Man and the Mans World: Yevhen Sverstiuk`s version (“The Cathedral in Scaffolding”)

Yevhen Sverstiuk (1928-2014), the Soviet-era dissident and original philosopher, was essentially a Christian thinker. He did not treat with contempt agnostics or heterodoxes and did not press his vision of another world and man, displaying intolerance only to immoral politicians and ideological propagandists of totalitarianism. Sverstiuk was the author of Ukrainian “Samizdat” (self-publishing) of the 1960-80’s. Those authors were political opponents of the Soviet system, but they often had much in common with positions of the “legal” Ukrainian philosophers and were participants of “Kyiv Philosophical School” and “Kyiv Philosophical Circles”. The essay by Sverstiuk “The Cathedral in Scaffolding” (the late 1960’s) is not only the examination of the novel “The Cathedral” by Oles` Honchar and discussions about it. First of all, that is a philosophical treatise on the problem of Man and the Man World, being in concordance with the philosophy of the “Kyiv Philosophical School”. Eventually, there appears the Christian democratic utopia of the philosopher.