Skovoroda Online Concordance - Homepage


Online Concordance to the Complete Works of Hryhorii Skovoroda

Introduction

Skovoroda's portrait by Lukianov
H. Skovoroda (1722-1794),
Portrait by H. Lukianov, 1794

Welcome! This concordance is a free resource for searching, analyzing, and reading Hryhorii Skovoroda's oeuvre.

Visitors can search for specific words, discover their frequency and view them in a meaningful context (the so-called KWIC format: ‘keyword in context’). The concordance provides a complete inventory of Skovoroda’s Slavonic, Latin, and Greek vocabulary as reflected in his poetry, philosophical tracts and epistolography.

This site also contains Skovoroda’s complete corpus for online reading and browsing.

A separate section contains photo facsimiles of extant autographs and manuscript copies. These are the property of the T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature, the H. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy (both of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv), and the Institute of Manuscripts of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.

The electronic texts for this concordance are based on a new edition prepared by Professor Leonid Ushkalov of the H. Skovoroda National Pedagogical University of Kharkiv: Hryhorii Skovoroda, Povna akademichna zbirka tvoriv. 2nd ed. Kharkiv-Edmonton-Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2011 (now available online).


Why an Online Concordance?

There are 247,176 words in Skovoroda’s complete oeuvre, including frequent words such as conjunctions. Of these, 47,713 are distinctive forms, but used numerous times in a variety of contexts. Our concordance provides an index (word list) of these unique forms—often referred to as ‘keywords’ or ‘headwords’— and allows readers to view each of them in the multiple contexts they appear throughout the works. To cite an example: the word “A” (‘and’, ‘but’) appears 2257 times and can be examined in all its occurrences. Here is just one instance:

If each keyword were to be printed as a separate line with a minimum context as in the preceding example, then there would be at least 247,176 lines of text. As is apparent, the word “A” alone would take up 2257 lines. At 30 lines per page, the concordance would be around 8239 pages long. In other words, it would comprise more than sixteen 500-page volumes. Publishing such an edition in hard copy would be impractical and unrealistic from the financial point of view. Moreover, it would necessarily restrict the readership. In contrast, this online publication is accessible worldwide at no cost to all researchers, teachers and students.

Uses of the Concordance

The Online Concordance to the Complete Works of Skovoroda offers for the first time a global view of Skovoroda’s diverse lexicon. When employed independently or in conjunction with the online corpus or the forthcoming Ukrainian print edition (Leonid Ushkalov, editor), it will help to move Skovoroda studies in new directions. The Concordance gives a wide spectrum of researchers—linguists, literary scholars, theologians, philosophers, Slavists, Latinists, and historians of Ukrainian culture—an unprecedented perspective on this fascinating thinker and writer. The types of analysis made possible by the concordance may lead, for example, to new dictionaries, both general and specialized of the old Ukrainian literary language on the eve of the Romantic movement. It can revolutionize thematic, linguistic and stylistic studies of his corpus. These, in turn, may facilitate more reliable translations into modern Ukrainian and other languages, thereby giving a much wider audience access to one of the most remarkable eighteenth-century figures in Eastern Europe.

Context

The Online Concordance to the Complete Works of Skovoroda is the first such tool devoted to the pre-romantic period of Ukrainian culture and only the second concordance in the entire history of Ukrainian literature. The first endeavor of this type was a concordance devoted only to the complete poetry of Taras Shevchenko.

This project was made possible through a generous grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We gladly welcome your feedback and suggestions via the ‘guest book’ link.

For a guide to the site and its features, please click on "Using the Concordance" above.

Natalia Pylypiuk and Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj

Ukrainian Culture, Language and Literature Program

Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta

28 June 2009

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