INTRODUCTION
1
Although Taras Shevchenko is well known to the readers of Ukrainian literature, his contemporary and good friend, Panteleimon Kulish, is often ignored. Yet, both in the Ukrain¬ian Romantic movement and in Ukrainian literature as a whole, Kulish’s role was as significant as Shevchenko’s—a fact that was not fully appreciated until the third decade of the 20th century. In fact, the intellectuals and writers of the Ukrainian renaissance of the ’20s viewed Ukrainian literary history in terms of these two major figures, rejecting Shev¬chenko in favor of Kulish: for them, Kulish represented the European-oriented, erudite and highly literary stream of Ukrainian literature and culture as opposed to the provincial, peasant, mass-oriented and politically motivated literature, whose symbol Shevchenko unjustly became soon after his death. Esteeming Shevchenko as an educated man and a conscious artist, Kulish was horrified by this evolving image of Shevchenko. Although their temperaments were very dif¬ferent, Kulish and Shevchenko were good friends from the time of their first meeting in Ukraine. Shevchenko valued Kulish’s critical insight into his works, and there is even some evidence to suggest that Shevchenko wrote his best poems when he was closest to his friend. It was Kulish who delivered the oration at Shevchenko’s funeral.
Kulish was born in 1819 in Voronezh in the province of Chernihiv. His father lived on a khutir (homestead)—the isolated one-family dwelling occupied by upper-class Cossacks in the 17th century and the middle strata of the Ukrainian petty gentry in the 19th. ...
- Roman Bahrij Pikulyk