Chapter SIX: Pantaleimon Kulish

Shevchenko was a poet by the grace of God and a genius who set the path for the Ukrainian people. Endowed with an iron will and firmly devoted to the principles in which he believed, he was able to undergo all the hardships of his sad life without giving way or varying the course on which he had embarked. Not so with Pantaleimon Kulish who was great in his positive activity but unfortunately equally great in his defects and errors. He devoted himself to the cause of Ukraine but over and over again some peculiar mode of thinking cast over his reputation a shadow which was easily avoidable. It makes his figure unusual and pathetic rather than tragic. He stood the buffets of fate but it is always difficult to discover exactly what he sought from life.

Kulish was born of a small landowning Kozak family in the district of Hlukhiv in the government of Chernihiv July 27, 1819 and was thus only five years younger than Shevchenko. He first learned to read in Church Slavonic from a young cousin and as a child he was greatly influenced by a neighboring landowner Ulyana Muzhikovskaya who impressed him as a highly superior being and almost a god.

He was sent to school but was not allowed to finish the gymnasium because of the prejudices of his father. Despite this he succeeded in entering the University of Kiev and paid his way by acting for months at a time as tutor on various estates. It was from this period that he first became interested in peasant poetry and folksongs and some of his stories based on folk motifs were published in the collection _Kievlyanin_, edited by Prof. Maksimovich in 1840. In 1843 he published a collection of poems, _Ukraina_, based largely upon folksongs with some additions of his own, and he dreamed of combining them to form a Ukrainian _Iliad_ but he did not have the opportunity or the poetical ability to undertake it. He was not a natural poet like Shevchenko and seemed to avoid direct comparison with him.

On the other hand the historical novel always interested him. While he was in the university, he had become acquainted with the works of Sir Walter Scott and he instinctively realized that the exploits of the Kozaks lent themselves to the same kind of treatment. Yet even then some impulse kept him from achieving in that line the perfection which he might have had.

At Kiev he became friendly with Kostomariv and Shevchenko and was with them in the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius. He very soon was called to St. Petersburg by Pletnev to teach in the University there and also to conduct classes in Russian for foreigners. He married the sister of Bilozersky, another of the members of the Society, and had just received a stipend to study abroad, when the blow fell upon the Society. Kulish was arrested in Warsaw, as he was preparing to leave the country, and was brought back to St. Petersburg for the trial. He fared better than most of the others and was only sentenced to two months in prison, perhaps through the intercession of Pletnev who warmly recommended him as a young man of high mind and religious principles. He was then exiled to Tula with the prohibition of writing but the supervision over him was not so strict as that over Shevchenko and he was able to continue his literary work by publishing under various pen names.

On his return to St. Petersburg in 1850 he was able to resume anonymous writing and he published the first of his studies on Gogol, the money for which was furnished by the distinguished Slavophile Sergey Aksakov. For a while he held a small job in the government service and then his friends bought for him 120 desyatins of land in Ukraine and he and his wife went there in an effort to earn his living by agriculture.

After the accession of Alexander II, he was granted an amnesty and the permission to publish under his own name. He rapidly brought out his _Memoirs on South Russia_ (1856), prepared the first edition of his _Grammar_ and in 1857 he published in both Ukrainian and Russian his main historical novel, the _Black Council_.

In his _Grammar_ Kulish set the standard for the orthography of the Ukrainian language and his decisions were accepted as final for many years. He made himself the authority on all kinds of linguistic and grammatical and stylistic questions, and hoped that his work would be employed in the proposed Ukrainian school system. He followed this book with simpler writings intended for the common people.

The _Black Council_ was his chief work of fiction. It dealt with the period immediately after the death of Khmelnitsky, when the various Kozak colonels were competing for the hetmanship and when Poland and Moscow had divided the country between the right and left banks of the Dnieper. He emphasized the vivid contrasts between the manners and customs of the officer class and the more unruly and undisciplined members of the Zaporozhian Sich as Kyrylo Tur, and although he pays tribute to their loyalty and fidelity to Kozak traditions and to the bravery and heroic conduct which they demonstrated on all occasions, there is always a lurking feeling in the mind of the reader that Kulish did not after all consider these Kozaks of the Sich as the real bearers of a national culture of a very high type.

With the love affair between Petro Shramenko and Lesya Cherivanivna, Kulish remained true to the type of the romantic novel as it was then understood in Europe. There are the usual scenes of adventure for the hero, the battles, the feasts, the feats of arms, that we are accustomed to expect. There is also a certain democratic tinge to the novel. On the whole it is a good piece of work and it was only at the very end in an epilogue in the Russian translation that he alluded to the certainty that it was the undisciplined actions of the Kozaks that had precipitated the loss of Ukrainian independence and had ruined the country.

In 1861 his brother-in-law Bilozersky secured permission to publish a Ukrainian journal at St. Petersburg, the _Osnova_, and Kulish, while forbidden by the censor to take over control of the publication, was its main contributor. It gave him an opportunity for sociological and ethnographical studies and it also gave opportunity to his enemies to criticize him, for in one unfortunate article, he declared that the hetmanate was a tree rotten internally and he asserted that the Ukrainians should not regret its destruction. Kostomariv, an infinitely more careful and better scholar, agreed in part with Kulish but he emphasized that the method of its destruction was the important factor and that this had been more harmful to Ukraine than the destruction itself.

There were other difficulties with the _Osnova_. Kulish still remained close to the ideals of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius which had been suppressed fourteen years earlier but at the same time he did not feel free to include in the periodical the extremely iconoclastic views on federalism which had precipitated the arrest of its members. He was little more friendly to the radical social views of some of the younger generation who had been influenced by the Russian radicals of the late fifties. As a result the journal languished and finally came to an end before the repressive measures taken by the Russian government after the Polish revolt of 1863.

For a few years after the ending of the _Osnova_, there came a period when severe restrictions were put upon the printing of Ukrainian books. During this time Kulish was in the Russian service in Poland and then in 1869 he went to Eastern Galicia in Austria-Hungary to establish closer relations with the Western Ukraine and arrange to have his books published in Lviv.

Here his unfortunate disposition again got him into trouble with the leading Ukrainian circles. In 1882 in the _Krashanka_ he used certain expressions that convinced the Ukrainians of the West that he was taking sides with the Poles against them and he suffered again severe criticism.

The fact was that Kulish had more or less fundamentally changed his views during the passing years. In his younger days he had noted in his travels that the Ukrainian customs and language had been better preserved in the villages than in the urban centres and on the large estates. He had already realized that this peasant culture was on a relatively low level and he became convinced that it was largely the result of the turbulent manners of the Kozaks. He did not take into account the other factors of denationalization that had swept from the Ukrainian population the bulk of the gentry and the educated class who had been drawn off into other fields. He expounded his ideas in the _Unification of Rus_ in 1874-7, and also in the _Falling Away of Little Russia from Poland_ in 1889. Both of these books aroused violent antipathy to his views and in the minds of many people they outbalanced the work which he had done for the upbuilding of the movement.

To tell the truth, Kulish had become gradually a violent Kozakophobe and he could hardly speak of those doughty warriors without applying to them all kinds of opprobrious epithets, despite the fact that it was in their camps that the Ukrainians had survived foreign pressure for two centuries. The whole theme of many of his later poems as in the _Village Sparks_ can be well summed up in these lines,

For thou hast perished, Ukraina mother,
Amid Kozaks and all the worthless rabble.
In blood and ruins dies the fairest flower
Of thine abundant nature.

Yet this is from the pen of the same writer who first tried to unite Eastern and Western Ukraine and who had written interesting and sympathetic studies of the Kozaks of the preceding centuries.

He had returned to poetry after the death of Shevchenko with his collection _Dosvidki_ (_Experiences_) in 1862 and he brought out several other volumes. They were good poems but they were sadly lacking in that especial spark of genius which alone marks the great poets of the world.

At the same time and despite his unmitigated opposition to the Kozaks and all that they stood for, Kulish continued to work at the translation of the masterpieces of the world into Ukrainian. He translated many of the plays of Shakespeare, the poems of Byron, and much of Goethe and Schiller. On a more ambitious scale during his residence in Lviv he translated the Books of Moses and then in 1870 he brought out the Four Gospels and the Book of Psalms. He continued to work on this after his return to Russia and by his death he had completed twenty-nine books of the Old Testament. All this was in addition to a constant stream of journalistic work.

Kulish continued to work to the very end and often in the greatest poverty. For long periods of time, he and his wife were compelled to live on almost the same fare as those peasants whom he affected to despise and for whom he was expending all his energy. Illness did not stop his working and he continued almost to the very end which came on February 2, 1897.

His was a sad fate. One of that brilliant group that had suffered so much for the cause of Ukraine in 1847, he gradually drifted towards a point of view that could benefit no one but the enemies of his people. Yet with it all he continued his work, sacrificing more and more to it, without being able to see the inherent contradictions between his goal and his philosophy. With his ability and his personal integrity, he could have been a far more attractive figure, had he ever reached a proper balance but even without that, he has left his mark upon the development of the language and literature and he was one of the first to grasp the possibilities of contact between Eastern and Western Ukraine and to act upon it. In evaluating his work we must agree with Yefremiv that he was great in his positive achievements but also great in his mistakes. Then and only then can we see him in his true perspective.