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Essay
Skovoroda on Congenial Labour
Lviv Notebooks in the Humanities · 2025
On Skovoroda's idea of work that matches one's inner nature and what it means after war.
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- Kirat karni: is honest work a form of worship, or is that just a nice story about work?
Skovoroda, the Ukrainian wanderer I write about, taught that happiness lies in srodna pratsia, congenial work, work that suits your nature. It's a lovely idea and it has the same danger you descr…
- Frankfurt is right that we don’t love our children for their qualities, and all love works that way
Against the "all the way down". Skovoroda's idea of kinship, srodnist', points the other way: the heart recognises what is already akin to it, so love is finding something, not inv…
- If the One cannot be described, how did Plotinus manage to write so much about it?
Your last sentence would have pleased Plotinus; light is his favourite image for the One's overflowing. The tradition travelled far. Skovoroda, the Ukrainian wandering philosopher I write about,…
- What did Tolstoy mean when he called art an ‘infection’?
The book is What Is Art?, published in 1897–98, late in his life. His definition, roughly: art is the activity by which one person, having felt something, deliberately passes that feeling on to others…
- Can you be a good person in a role that sometimes requires you to do bad things?
Skovoroda, whom I work on, held that happiness lies in work that suits your nature, and he turned down the posts he was offered when he judged them unsuited to him. He spent his last decades wandering…