Rural Philosophy and Poetry, Distant from the World

Panteleimon Kulish

In his philosophical and journalistic work, Panteleimon Kulish attempts to clarify, in a thoroughly romantic style, how “a people generously gifted by nature creates poetry without the aid of school learning, and how a person educated… by nature relates to a person who has been educated through artificial writing” as well as “to what extent the first type of education of the mind and heart will be sufficient to make a person wise and virtuous”? Another important theme of the work is the comparison of the Ukrainian nation, which developed for a long time in conditions of statelessness, with the seemingly civilised Russian nation. It is therefore not surprising that immediately after the book was published in 1879, its print run was confiscated at the request of the imperial censorship and almost completely destroyed.