intellectuals, some of whom served in St. Petersburg. Left Bank Ukraine produced
many fine writers, dramatists, and historians, including poet and philosopher
Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722–94). A rich school of dramas on religious and national
themes emerged from the Mohyla Academy; Feofan Prokopovich’s Vladymyr
(1705) heralded Grand Prince Volodymyr as Christianizer of Rus’in 988 and
ended with a paean to then Hetman Ivan Mazepa for his patronage of the arts. Over
the second half of the eighteenth century the Mohyla Academy shifted more to
seminary education, integrating Enlightenment ideas into the curriculum and
shaping a modern ecclesiastical elite. The majority of the empire’s Orthodox
bishops in this century (70 of 117) were Ukrainians or Belarus’ans, trained in
Kyiv and other regional centers. Colleges in Chernigov and Pereiaslav provided
secular training for administrative service for Ruthenian gentry at a time when the
Russian nobility was abjuring non-military service.
Ukrainian national consciousness of several political stripes continued to de-
velop. Some focused on Cossack liberties: immediately after Mazepa’s fall, Hryhorii
Hrabianka pennedThe Great War of Bohdan Khmelnytsky(1710), inaugurating a
cult of Khmelnytsky as a loyal servant of the Russian tsar in a bid to maintain
traditional Cossack autonomies despite Peter I’s wrath at Mazepa. Others were
broader: Samuil Velychko’sTale of Cossack Wars with the Poles(1720) developed
even more strongly an“ethno-national”vision of the Rus’ community as the
heartland of East Slavic, Orthodox civilization, now arrayed against non-Orthodox
forces in the Commonwealth. In 1728 in St. Petersburg even Feofan Prokopovich
penned a drama extolling Bohdan Khmelnytsky and implicitly Ukrainian auton-
omies even while it toed the line of imperial loyalty. Historian Faith Hillis calls this
trend the“Little Rus’idea”—an idealized vision of Rus’autonomy and East Slavic
Orthodox unity—that endured through the century. In 1767–8 when Catherine II
solicited feedback from communities across the empire in preparation of a new
imperial lawcode, Cossack delegates from the Left Bank requested the confirmation
of traditional Cossack political and economic rights, equality with the Russian
nobility, protection of their landholding, and abolition of new imperial taxes,
clearly expressing a vision of an autonomous state and ethnic community within
the imperial system. Cossack writers continued to develop the Little Rus’theme, as
in Semen Divovych’s 1762 poem,“Conversation between Great Russia and Little
Russia,”where“Little Russia”boldly declares its fraternal friendship and equality to
“Great Russia.”
Thefine artsflourished as well. As in the seventeenth century, schools in the
hetman’s capital in Hluhkiv and one in New Russia developed religious music.
Ukrainian-trained musicians dominated at the St. Petersburg court through the
century; similarly, Ukrainian painters enjoyed great success in Russia. The por-
traitist Dmytro Levytsky, for example, born and trained in Kyiv, emigrated to
St. Petersburg where hefilled an entire room in Catherine II’s palace at Tsarskoe
selo with sentimental folk portraits, as well as producing exquisite portraits of
Russian nobles. Traditional Ukrainian folk singers—itinerant minstrels who played
the bandura—traversed the countryside, singing religious and folk songs and
historical epics. Architecture, patronized in Kyiv and other centers by Cossack
110 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801