The items representing Ukrainian literature of the eighteenth century represent several distinct trends. Traditionally, Ukrainian literature of this period is seen as part of the general European Baroque, which reached Ukraine mainly through the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Baroque stylistics were taught at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, which reached its height before the Mazepa revolt against Peter I (1708). Baroque poetics informs a variety of Ukrainian literary genres of the period, including homilies, poetry, and religious polemics. The last exemplar of the tradition is Hryhorii Skovoroda, a wandering tutor-philosopher (1722-1794), whose works circulated largely in manuscript during his lifetime. Skovoroda's output ranged from plays and fables to poems, almost exclusively didactic, religious, and philosophical in nature. His philosophy conceived of the world as one of the hyposthoses of God's revelation (His Word), along with the Holy Scriptures. His Razgovor (ÔA Conversation/Dialogue') represents his need to find a proper relationship to God, i.e., to find the path that God has lain out for an individual in life.

As in the seventeenth century, confessional issues continued to be of significance in Ukrainian intellectual life with the confrontation between the Orthodox and the Uniates (those Orthodox who accepted the primacy of the pope in Rome and some theological points of the Western Church, while retaining the Byzantine Rite) and the Orthodox and the Heterodox (various Protestant sects). Stefan Iavors'kyi's Kamen' viery (Rock of Faith) represents one of the Orthodox responses to Protestantism and is an important statement about the nature of Ukrainian Orthodoxy.

Basic didactic material (both for book learning and for moral edification) grew in importance as the standards of elite Ukrainian intellectual life declined under Russian imperial pressure (and the rise of universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg that eclipsed the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, which previously had been the intellectual center of East Slavdom). The Alfavit sobrannyi, rifnami slozhannyi ot sviatykh pisanii falls within a long tradition of book learning based on Holy Scripture, containing short, almost epigraphic pieces of a moral-didactic nature.

The Iroicheskaia piesn' o pokhodie Igorove (The Tale of Ihor's Campaign) represents an imperial pan-Russian tendency Ð the desire to reinvent history, within a glorious literary tradition like that of other Europeans. Originally published in 1800, the Slovo (Lay, as it is generally called) was hailed as a significant find relating to ancient "Russian" history and represented the culmination of a trend that had begun largely in the sixteenth century where Muscovite chroniclers began to appropriate Old Rus' history exclusively for the Russian Empire. The Slovo is the tale of a failed military campaign by Ihor Sviatoslavych in 1185 against the Polovtsians (a nomadic Turkic people of the Steppe, with whom the Rus' contended before the Mongol invasion). It contains elements of an epic oral tradition and is purported to have been written down by the bard Boian. Recent work by Harvard Professor Edward L. Keenan has persuasively argued that the Slovo actually is a forgery and the work of the renowned Bohemian Slavist Frantishek Dobrovsky' and a circle of Muscovite intellectuals. The Slovo remains an important cultural icon for Ukrainians and Russians alike.