About the author:
Alexandra V. Toichkina — PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Philological faculty, Saint-Petersburg State University, Universitetskaya Embankment, 7-9-11B, 199034 St. Petersburg, Russia.
E-mail:
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3723-1553
Abstract:
The article examines the “farm philosophy” of the Ukrainian writer and scientist P.A. Kulish (1819–1897) as a complex synthesis of Rousseau`s ideas, romantic aesthetics, populist ideology and Christian views. In a number of features, it is a kind of analogue of the Great Russian “estate culture” of the late 18th — early 20th centuries. “Farm philosophy” is ambiguously related to the life of the writer on his own farm Zarog in the Luben region on the territory of Malorossia in the 1850s. The reality of everyday life and relations with the serfs are, on the one hand, in contradiction with the provisions of his “farm philosophy”, on the other hand, they are the practical experience on which the writer developed these ideas. The ideas of the Kulish “farm philosophy” are not only a religious and philosophical substantiation of the positive sociocultural meaning of the farm in the history of the Ukrainian people, its language and literature, but also a kind of historiosophical program for the development of the Ukrainian nation.