Panteleimon Kulish: A Ukrainian Romantic Conservative

Abstract

The Ukrainian national revival dates from the early nineteenth century and is closely tied to Romanticism. The greatest Ukrainian romantic poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861) was also the chief promoter of the national awakening of his country, which had lost the autonomy it had enjoyed under Cossack rule in the seventeenth century. The Cossack past fuelled the romantic imagination of Shevchenko and his contemporaries who, under the influence of German idealist philosophers (Sendling, Herder) and Russian and Polish Romanticism, attempted in their works to carve out a new national identity for the Ukraine. When this identity began to emerge in mid-century it owed its existence to these men of letters, primarily poets. Among them was Panteleimon Kulish (1817–1897), second in importance to Shevchenko. Although one of his first works was a long poem ‘Ukraina’ (1843), Kulish was more drawn to the historical novel and was strongly influenced by Walter Scott. His poem was written in Ukrainian, but his first historical novel, Mykhailo Charnyshenko (1843) was in Russian. Kulish gradually changed to Ukrainian in his prose, thus sustaining the efforts of Ukrainian writers to establish a new literary language and to stress their cultural separateness from Russia.