The aim of this article was to try to inquire into the ideological views of Panteleimon Kulish – a famous scientist, writer, poet, public figure as Celebration of the 200th anniversary of P. Kulish is not only for honoring his memory, but it’s a good chance due to P. Kulish to get to know our past and to realize our present. It is a cause to raise topics and problems, which were once and now, are challenges for Ukrainian society. It is an opportunity to talk about the environment of P. Kulish, namely T. Shevchenko, participants of Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, and about social movement of 1860th in general and Russian infringement upon Ukrainian language. It is a chance to analyze the European way of Ukrainian development, controversial role of Cossacks’ period in our past and mythological glorification of this phenomenon.

While characterizing the work of Panteleimon Kulish we emphasized that he was the first man who began to write scientific works in Ukrainian. P. Kulish was the first professional literary critic. He wrote the first Ukrainian historical novel «Chorna Rada». He set up the first alphabet, that’s why he is called «the father of Ukrainian orthography». Great aptitudes for translation work of P. Kulish are also mentioned in the article. Thus, due to P. Kulish Ukrainian people could read for the first time in their native language the works of the most famous world classics.

It was proved that Kulish was opponent of the revolutionary ideology in the struggle for Ukrainian statehood. He supported cultural, evolutionary, not forced way of Ukrainian statehood development. He proved in his publicistic works that if Ukrainian people didn’t want to be the slaves of other nations, they should struggle for freedom with the help of education and harmony but not by force.

Attention is paid to the fact that P. Kulish raised an important question of human history - about the correlation between humanistic morality and class-based, national and personal interests, focusing attention on the priority of general human values. He felt the need to become proficient in the European culture by Ukrainian people preserving at the same time their national identity.

Great merits of P. Kulish in historical and cultural Ukrainian process are proved, namely he together with I. Puliui and I. Nechui-Levytskyi began to translate the Bible into Ukrainian. We pointed out the critical and radical nature of P. Kulish’s thoughts as for the different religious prejudices. He condemned interfaith struggle which favoured to increasing enmity between nations on the religious basis, called upon to «fraternize» regardless of nationalities and religious beliefs.

So, P. Kulish as a true supporter of freedom paid attention to the fact that freedom should not be equated with anarchy. He underlined the necessity for social order and culture education of human coexistence. When writing the article, we used general historical (comparative and historical, retrospective) methods. The method of source study analysis was also applied

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