Belles-Lettres in the Private Libraries of the Clergy of the Ukrainian Eparchies (Second Half of the Eighteenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries)

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to identify and analyze the corpus of Enlightenment-era literary works held in the private libraries of the clergy of the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine in the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This category of books serves as a marker of the distinctive intellectual and cultural tastes of the Ukrainian clergy and reflects important shifts in reading culture. The study focuses in particular on the registers of sixteen private book collections belonging to clergymen. The choice of collections is justified by the similar trajectories of their owners’ lives: education at the “Latin schools”, teaching career, and service in various parts of the Hetmanate or Sloboda Ukraine. Methodologically, the paper draws on approaches to the study of cultural phenomena developed in French historiography, involving statistical methods and serial analysis. The author finds that Enlightenment belles-lettres constituted the second largest segment among the “secular” books in clerical libraries, after scientific works and textbooks. The Ukrainian clergy sought out didactic and encyclopedic reading matter, as well as reading for entertainment. These traits are characteristic of Enlightenmentera reading culture. The body of new books in clerical libraries, including belles-lettres, displays the features of “extensive” reading and of the so-called “reading revolution”. The contents of libraries attest that in the second half of the eighteenth century a proportion of the Ukrainian clergy was swept up in the extraordinary enthusiasm for imaginative literature (particularly novels) that was simultaneously affecting reading culture in Western and Central Europe. Library registers and other sources point to the functioning of an intellectual network through which this cultural product circulated. The private book collections of the senior clergy of the Ukrainian eparchies illuminate the workings of cultural transfer and the channels and limits of dissemination of new ideas, helping to make an empirically grounded case for the region’s involvement in the pan-European cultural and intellectual developments of the Age of Enlightenment.