Panteleimon Kulish

Panteleimon Kulish (1819-1897) was a Ukrainian writer, critic, poet, folklorist and translator who wrote in both Russian and Ukrainian. He lived under the Russian Empire, and his work is tied to the shaping of modern Ukrainian culture, which makes him a key figure for anyone trying to understand the literature of his country.

He was born in 1819 in Voronizh, in what is now Sumy Oblast, into an impoverished family of Cossack gentry. His mother spoke only Ukrainian and passed on to him many folk songs, tales and legends. He completed only five years at the gymnasium in Novhorod-Siverskyi before enrolling at Kyiv University in 1837, but he could not finish his studies because he was unable to prove his noble status. With the help of Mykhailo Maksymovych he found a teaching post in Lutsk, where he wrote his first historical novella, in Russian. Back in Kyiv he befriended Taras Shevchenko, Mykola Kostomarov and Vasyl Bilozersky, and their circle became the core of the secret Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which hoped for a Ukrainian national revival within a free Slavic federation. For his membership he was arrested and exiled.

After his prison term and exile, Kulish changed course. He drew closer to the imperial authorities, set aside many of his romantic ideas about Ukrainian history and backed Ukraine's incorporation into the Russian Empire, a stance that set him against younger nationalists. His linguistic contribution, however, proved lasting: in the late 1850s he proposed an orthography based on phonetics rather than etymology, which later became the foundation of written modern Ukrainian. As a historian and folklorist he studied the medieval and Cossack past, and in his final years he translated much of Western European literature into Ukrainian, Shakespeare among them.

His political views kept shifting. After the Ems Decree in the 1880s he moved to Austrian Galicia and gave up his Russian citizenship, but his appeal for dialogue with the local Polish community went unanswered, and he returned to his earlier pro-Russian position. He spent his last years isolated on his estate at Motronivka, where he died in 1897.

His legacy rests on his orthographic work, his historical writing and his part in translating the Bible into modern Ukrainian, carried out with Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky and Ivan Puluj. His political opinions, though, earned him the rejection of much of the Ukrainian intelligentsia of his day.