ABOUT LAZAR BARANOVYCH’S KYIV-MOHYLA RHETORIC COURSE

The paper introduces the course of rhetoric by Lazar Baranovych, taught at the Kyiv Mohyla College, most likely in the academic year 1648/1649, and provides basic source information about the course of poetry by Teodosii Vasylevych-Baievskyi, preserved in the same manuscript codex. The latter course was taught in the academic year 1647/1648. Now the record is kept in Irkutsk. As for today, Baranovych’s work is the second oldest of the known Kyiv-Mohyla rhetoric courses that have survived. This rhetoric has a distinct practical orientation: in fact, it is a commented anthology of speeches arranged in accor dance with the traditional genres and themes of demonstrative eloquence in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. The purpose of the article is to attribute the courses and briefl y characterize the content of Baranovych’s rhetoric course. Since there are no dates on the title pages of either work, provenance and historical facts mentioned in the literary samples help establish the years in which the courses were taught. Among the exemplary texts of Lazar Baranovych’s rhetoric course, there are many orations addressed to well-known historical fi gures, such as Petro Mohyla, Sylvestr Kosov, Adam Kysil, Jerzy Ossoliński, Stanisław Koniecpolski, Samuel Korecki, and others. Th ese contemporary speeches were actually delivered or at least prepared for being used in real life circumstances. The choice of materials for the course characterizes the socio-cultural orientations of the professor and, to some extent, the entire Kyiv-Mohyla community at the beginning of the war led by Bohdan Khmelnytskyi. The collection of speeches shows that professor Baranovych was a fully loyal resident of the Polish-Lithuanian Common wealth. Concerned about the fate of Orthodoxy, Baranovych also demonstrates a respect ful attitude toward representatives of the Catholic confession. Interestingly enough, the Moscow Tsardom and the Muscovites, which would be later chosen as allies by the Ukrainian hetman, are presented in the course’s speeches as a distinctly hostile force.