8 - Ukrainians and Poles

Summary

Europe’s road to Muscovy passed through Warsaw and Kyiv (Kiev). Despite what one reads in books, the Renaissance and Reformation did reach Muscovy, if by this most indirect route. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Orthodox clerics trained in the rhetoric and languages of the Polish Renaissance and Reformation settled in Moscow. As Muscovy’s political power extended across eastern Ukraine and Kiev with Hetman Bohdan Khmelnyts’kyi’s rebellion against Poland (1648–54) and the Treaty of Eternal Peace between Muscovy and Poland (1686), Orthodox clerics came to terms with their newposition in a highly backward Orthodox state. Alexis Mikhailovich (r. 1645–76) saw them as people capable of improving Muscovite administration, and encouraged the emigration of learned Ukrainians. Iepifanii Slavynets’kyi was an early arrival, in 1649. Symeon Polots’kyi taught Alexis’s children Latin and Polish. The occasional Polish Jesuit was allowed to dispute with the Orthodox, as did Andrzej Kwieczynski before he was sent to break rocks in Siberia in 1660. Disputation itself was an import from Poland, and at this time Polish and Latin were understood to be the languages of reason. Latin itself was learned from Polish translations, for example of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’.

Ukrainian clerics such as Stepan Iavors’kyi and Teofan Prokopovych were indeed engaged in some fundamental transformations: of themselves as they reoriented Ruthenian Orthodoxy to Moscow, and of Moscow as they reoriented public life and political thought to the West. Such men introduced the baroque, not only in rhetoric, but in architecture, ceremonial and secular public displays. Stepan Chyzhevs’kyi, an alumnus of a Jesuit collegium, arranged Moscow’s first theatrical production.