Panteleimon Oleksandrovych Kulish is an outstanding figure of the Ukrainian national revival, writer, folklorist, ethnographer, linguist, translator, critic, editor, publisher, philosopher of history.
Childhood
He was born on July 7, 1819 on a farm near the town of Voronezh, which then belonged to the Chernihiv province (now the territory of the Sumy region). He came from a family of Cossack officers.
He received his education at the Novgorod-Siversky gymnasium, after which he continued his studies at the University of Kyiv.
In the second half of the 1830s, he attended lectures at the University of Kyiv as a free listener.
Creative activity
At one time, Kulish received a position as a teacher at the Lutsk Noble School. Later he worked in Kyiv and Rivne, and when in 1845 the magazine “Sovremennik” began to publish the first parts of his novel “The Black Council”, the writer was invited to St. Petersburg as a senior teacher of the gymnasium and lecturer of the Russian language.
In 1849, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences sent him on a business trip to Western Europe.
During his stay in Warsaw, he was arrested as a member of the Cyril and Methodius Society and taken back to St. Petersburg. There he spent 2 months in the prison department of the hospital, after which he was exiled to Tula.
Later, Kulish achieved an appointment to a position in the governor’s office, and later began to edit the unofficial part of the publication “Tula Provincial Vedomosti”.
During the 1850s, he returned to St. Petersburg, where he continued to engage in creativity, although for some time he did not have permission to publish his works.
In 1857, Kulish’s “Gramatka” was published , which became the first Ukrainian-language primer.
In the period from 1864 to 1868 he worked in Warsaw, from 1871 – in Vienna, and starting from 1873 – in St. Petersburg, where he held the position of editor of the “Journal of the Ministry of Railways”. During this period, he began to work on a three-volume study “The History of the Unification of Russia”. In addition, he taught Russian to foreign students at St. Petersburg University.
He spent the last years of his life on his own farm Motronivka, Chernihiv region, where he died on February 14, 1897.
Kulish’s contribution to Ukrainian literature
In general, Kulish’s translation activity made a great contribution to the development of Ukrainian literature.
In 1897, a collection of translations “The Borrowed Kobza” was published. It includes works by world-famous authors, including Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, George Byron, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, as well as 13 plays by William Shakespeare.
A great contribution of the writer was the desire to convey as accurately as possible not only the content, but also the form of the original texts of foreign classics.
The writer Ivan Franko noted that Kulish created a translation of “Hamlet”, which can be presented with dignity among European interpretations of Shakespeare’s work.
In particular, the writer became the first to translate the Bible into Ukrainian.
In addition to literary activities, Kulish was engaged in publishing and collaborated with the Ukrainian magazine “Osnova”.
Personal Life
On January 22, 1847, Kulish married Alexandra Bilozerskaya, who later became a writer.
Oleksandra published her first stories under the literary pseudonym Hanna Barvinok. In her honor, Kulish renamed the hamlet of Motronivka, where they settled, naming it Hannina Pustyn.
Works by Panteleimon Kulish:
Among the writer’s achievements:
- historical novel “Black Council”;
- collections of poetry: “Dawning. Dumas and Poems”, “Farm Poetry”, “Bell”, “Borrowed Kobza”;
- humorous stories: “Gypsy”, “Mr. Murlo”, “Little Russian Anecdotes”;
- historical stories: “Martin Hook”, “Brothers”, “Sich Guests”;
- the novel “Mikhail Charnyshenko, or Little Russia 80 Years Ago”.
Panteleimon Kulish: interesting facts
Here are some interesting facts from Kulish’s life:
- The writer was not faithful in marriage – throughout his life he repeatedly cheated on his wife. He is credited with a romantic relationship with the writer Marko Vovchok and the wife of Leonid Hlibov;
- became the author of the reformed Ukrainian spelling known as “Kulishivka”;
- with royalties from literary activities, he founded his own printing house “P.A. Kulish’s Printing House”;
- maintained friendly relations with Taras Shevchenko and became one of the first publishers of his collection “Kobzar”;
- traveled a lot in Ukraine, engaged in ethnographic research, collected folk art and studied traditions;
- In his work, he criticized the romanticized depiction of the Cossacks, calling for a realistic view of Ukrainian history;
- he also published works under pseudonyms, in particular Panko Kulish and Mykola M.
