He walked across the steppes of what is now Ukraine for the better part of forty years, refusing every form of capture the eighteenth century could offer him—academic chairs, court appointments, monastic vows, a fixed address, even, in a sense, his own name. When he died in a village in November of 1794, he asked that a single sentence be cut into his stone: The world tried to catch me but could not. The world has been trying ever since.

Hryhorii Skovoroda—the surname means, of all things, frying pan—was a peasant's son who studied at the Kyivan Academy, sang in the imperial chapel of Empress Elizabeth in St. Petersburg, walked alone across half of Europe, and returned home to give the rest of his life to a single idea. He called it affinity: the conviction that each person carries an inner calling as definite as the bed of a river, and that happiness is not chosen but recognized, the way one recognizes a face that has been waiting for one all along.

This book is about that idea, and about the strange and luminous man who lived it. But it is also about something larger and more uncomfortable. It is about how a culture decides who its philosophers are. It is about a quiet experiment that runs through this book like a second pulse—what if we walked into the alley behind our building, found the man who sleeps there, and crowned him a Philosopher of All Times and Peoples? Would anyone notice? Could anyone tell the difference? And what does the honest answer reveal about Skovoroda, about us, and about the machinery of intellectual reverence in every country that has ever needed a sage?

Written with warmth toward all sides of a brotherhood broken in our own time—woe to those who set kindred peoples against one another—this is a book for listeners who have never heard the name of the wandering philosopher from Poltava, and for listeners who have heard it all their lives and would like to hear it again, freshly, without the varnish.