# Panteleimon Kulish

Panteleimon Oleksandrovych Kulish (Ukrainian: Пантелеймон Олександрович Куліш; 7 August 1819 – 14 February 1897) was a Ukrainian writer, critic, poet, folklorist, and translator.

## Life

Panteleimon Kulish was born 7 August 1819 in Voronizh (now Sumy Oblast) into an impoverished Cossack gentry family. His mother, Kateryna Ivanivna, spoke exclusively Ukrainian and taught her son numerous folk songs, tales and legends. After completing only five years at the Novhorod-Siverskyi gymnasium, where he got acquainted with classical works of Russian literature and folklore, Kulish enrolled at Kyiv University in 1837 but was not allowed to finish his studies because he was not a noble. Thanks to the protection of Mikhail Yuzefovich and Mykhailo Maksymovych, in 1840 he obtained a teaching position in Lutsk, where he wrote his first historical novel in Russian, Mykhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago (2 vols, 1843).
In 1843–45, Kulish taught in Kyiv and studied Ukrainian history and ethnography. There he befriended Taras Shevchenko, Mykola Kostomarov, and Vasyl Bilozersky; their circle later became the nucleus of the secret Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which envisioned a Ukrainian national rebirth, including national independence, within a free and equal Slavic federation. In 1847, Kulish was arrested for his participation in this organization, and spent some time in prison and a few years in exile. In the late 1850s, he was reunited with Kostomarov and others of the Cyril-Methodian "Brethren" and participated in the Ukrainian journal Osnova (The Foundation). At this time, he published his famous Notes on Southern Rus' in which he pioneered a new Ukrainian orthography for the Ukrainian vernacular, the Kulishivka alphabet, based on phonetics rather than etymology. This later became the basis of the modern written Ukrainian language. In the early 1860s Kulish published several scientific papers on Ukrainian Medieval and Cossack history.
In the 1860s and 1870s, Kulish gradually turned more conservative and began to criticize Shevchenko, the Cossack revolts, and the ideal of the Cossacks as the defenders of popular liberty. Eventually, despite Tsarist repression of Ukrainian culture and the ban on the appearance of the Ukrainian language in print, he developed a theory that Ukraine and Russia should be politically united but divergent in culture, an approach which won few adherents among the Ukrainian intelligentsia of the time. Nevertheless, this conservative approach to Ukrainian affairs was never completely extinguished and was later resurrected in a different form by other Ukrainian political thinkers such as Vyacheslav Lypynsky, Stepan Tomashivsky, and others.
In the 1880s, after the introduction of Ems Decree, Kulish moved to Austrian Galicia. In light of the ban on Ukrainian publications in the Russian Empire, he resigned from being a Russian subject and adopted the citizenship of Austria. In Galicia Kulish cooperated with the local Ukrainian cultural and political leaders. Thus he was one of the first Ukrainian figures to, at least in part, successfully bridge the gap between Russian and Austrian Ukraine. He also appealed to Poles, calling for them to recognize Ukrainians as equals and to establish mutual dialogue, but his proposal was ignored by most leaders of Galicia's Polish community. This led Kulish to return to his previous Russophile views. The author spent his last years isolated on his homestead in northern Ukraine. During these years he translated a great deal of west European literature, including Shakespeare, into Ukrainian.

## Literary activities

During his early years at the University of Kyiv, Kulish came under the influence of the historian and literary figure Mykhaylo Maksymovych who turned his attention to his native Ukrainian culture. Maksymovych promoted Kulish's literary efforts and published several of his early stories. His first longer work written in Ukrainian was the epic poem Ukraina (1843). In Kyiv Kulish also got in contact with local Polish nobility and learned the Polish language, which allowed him to read the works of Adam Mickiewicz and other Polish-language authors. Living in Lutsk, he befriended Stefan Zienowicz, a Polish chemist and mineralogist who had earlier worked at the University of Kyiv, and had close relations with the city's Polish community. During his second period of life in Kyiv Kulish got acquainted with Polish writer and literary critic Michał Grabowski, who remained his lifelong friend. Thanks to his acquaintance with Grabowski's compatriot, antiquarian Stanisław Świdziński, Kulish got access to valuable documents of Polish-Ukrainian history, including materials from the time of Cossacks and Haidamaks, as well as written correspondence of hetman Pylyp Orlyk, letters and documents of the Khanenko family and the chronicle of Samiilo Velychko.
As a result of his research, Kulish created several historical novels in Ukrainian. His most famous contribution in this field was Black Council [uk], which was dedicated to a historical event from Cossack times. The author was also active in historical writing, composing a brief history of Ukraine in verse (under the title Ukraina) and a much larger History of the Reunification of Rus in three volumes. The latter dealt with the era of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the seventeenth century. His two-volume collection of Ukrainian folklore, Notes on Southern Rus retains its scholarly significance to the present day.
Together with Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky, and Ivan Puluj, Panteleimon Kulish was the first known person to translate the whole of the Bible into the modern Ukrainian language. The original Ukrainian translation of the Holy Script was published in Vienna in 1903 by the British and Foreign Bible Society.

## Legacy

Kulish's works had a significant influence on the formation of Ukrainian intelligentsia and its views by introducing a native Ukrainian perspective on history as a counterweight to Russian imperial ideology. At the same time, Kulish was not among the devoted proponents of the so-called "populist" school of Ukrainian history, which saw the Ukrainian society as exclusively democratic and standing in direct opposition to Polish aristocratism and Russification. Instead, he viewed high culture and statist tradition as important components of Ukrainians' development as a nation. He recognized the potential of the All-Russian political idea, simultaneously considering Polish rule over Ukraine to have been an important civilizing factor for the country, and refused to see Ukraine's historical development solely through the prism of Cossack history. In his public activities Kulish strove to achieve reconciliation between the Polish, Ukrainian and Russian nations.
On 7 August 2019, a Google Doodle was created to celebrate Kulish's 200th birthday.

## Adaptations

A nine-episode television series was created by Mykola Zaseyev-Rudenko on the base of Kulish's novel Black Council at the Dovzhenko Film Studios in 2000.