HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

180 IHORSEVCENKOMoscow with the unlucky Lavrentij Zyzanij in 1627; let us recall PatriarchNikon's "purification" of religious texts, ostensibly with the help of Greek,but, in fact, largely of Kievan, models; or the edition of the Moscow"Anfologion" of 1660, in which Kievan texts appear in a different, local,orthography; let us, finally, recall the Moscow career of Ukrainian hellenizingscholars, such as Epifanij Slavynec'kyj.This situation lasted until the last quarter of the seventeenth century.Soon afterwards, a turning point occurred. It is known to all. Neo-Byzantinism, the cultural mainstay of the tsardom of Moscow, lost out, notwithout rearguard battles involving both learned Greek visitors or immigrantsand learned natives, such as Evfimij of the Cudov Monastery. After alapse of less than fifty years, the new Russian Empire began to import itsculture from the West on a large scale and it was that empire that soon providedits Ukrainian dominions with Western values. In the 1730s and 1740sthe Italian Rastrelli and the German Johann Gottfried Schedel built ordrafted edifices in Kiev (the High Belltower, the Church of St. Andrew);these men came to Kiev not from Italy or Germany, however, but, in oneway or another, from St. Petersburg.The example of Rastrelli reminds us of an important general characteristicof Ukrainian cultural contacts both with the "East" and with the West.This characteristic is the lack of direct access to original sources duringlong stretches of Ukrainian history. Ukrainians received cultural valuesfrom abroad through intermediaries. I already mentioned that the Rus' ofKiev barely knew Greek—they received Byzantine literature mainlythrough Bulgaria; when it comes to the culture of the Counter-Reformation(which we sometimes imprecisely call the Renaissance and the Baroque),Ukrainians received it mainly through Poland; Classicism in architecturethey got through the Russian Empire. Even the literary neoclassics of thetwentieth century turned toward French symbolist poets not without receivinga stimulus from the Russian writers of the "Silver Age." It is true thatwe can quote parallels to this "secundarity" from elsewhere, for instance,from among the Bulgarians, for the Baroque and the Rococo of the Bulgarianrebirth have some of their roots in the art of Ottoman Istanbul. Theseparallels, however, are not very helpful; the fact is that the Ukrainian secundarityinvolved a certain weakness.I am not going to deal here with the "real" East and its cultural coexistencewith Ukraine: with the Cumans, the Black Hats (in the language ofthe chronicles, ćernye kłobuki); with their alliances with the Rus' princes,including the alliance of 1223 before the Kalka Battle; with their marriageswith the families of Kievan princes; or with the Turkic graffito in theChurch of St. Sophia. Nor will I deal, when we come to later times, with the