袦懈泻芯谢邪 袣褍谢褨褕 - the most famous Ukrainian playwright of the twentieth century. After his mother鈥檚 early death, Kulish spent most of his childhood in orphanages and charity homes. He finished his early education thanks to the financial support of distant acquaintances. He began writing satirical poems and plays as a gymnasium student in Oleshky. After graduating from the gymnasium in Poti (now in Georgia) in 1914, he studied history and philology at Odesa University. Kulish鈥檚 university education was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. He was conscripted into the Russian Army, took part in military campaigns as an infantry officer in Galicia, Volhynia, and Belarus, and thus came into contact with the Ukrainian national movement. In 1917 Kulish was wounded at the front and discharged. Later that year he served as head of the town council in Oleshky. He participated in the Ukrainian Struggle for Independence (1917鈥�20), organizing a guerrilla regiment to fight the Russian Volunteer Army in Southern Ukraine and distinguishing himself as its commanding officer.
Kulish wrote fourteen plays. Six of them were published during his lifetime. He became famous after the stage success in 1924 of his first play, 97, which is generally considered the beginning of Soviet Ukrainian drama and the first major play written in the USSR as a whole. It was, however, not staged as Kulish had written it, but was censored by first production鈥檚 director, Hnat Yura, who changed Kulish鈥檚 tragic finale to an ideologically correct, optimistic one. Kulish鈥檚 subsequent plays shared similar fates and were heavily censored or banned outright by the Soviet authorities. As a dramatist, Kulish initially devoted his efforts to portraying the postrevolutionary struggle among the peasantry of Southern Ukraine. Besides 97, the plays on that subject included Komuna v stepakh (A Commune in the Steppes, 1925) and, several years later, the final work in his 鈥榲illage trilogy鈥欌€擯roshchai, selo (Farewell, Village, 1933). The Soviet censors forced him not only to revise the latter, but even to rename it Povorot Marka (Marko's Return, 1934), deeming the original title an allusion to the destruction of the traditional Ukrainian village by Soviet collectivization and the Famine-Genocide of 1932鈥�3.
During the second phase of his dramaturgy, Kulish turned to writing comedy and satire. In Otak zahynuv Huska (That鈥檚 How Huska Perished, 1925) and Khulii Khuryna (1926), which harked back to Nikolai Gogol鈥檚 themes and motifs, he ridiculed the attitudes and prejudices of both prerevolutionary Russian imperial society and of the new Soviet bureaucracy. The culmination of his of demythologization of the Bolshevik revolution was his melodrama Zona (Ergot, 1926), which Kulish later reworked and renamed Zakut (Dead End, 1929). He also wrote a 鈥榣inguistic comedy,鈥� Myna Mazailo (1929), where, in a manner akin to Moli猫re, he satirized the political and social impact of the Soviet policy of Ukrainization.
During his most productive and creative period as a playwright and close collaborator of Les Kurbas and the Berezil theater, Kulish abandoned the style and tools of traditional, realist dramaturgy. Instead, he experimented with expressionist and avant-garde writing, often combining it with elements of the Ukrainian puppet theater (vertep) and school dramas popular of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His most important trilogy of that period鈥擭arodnii Malakhii (The People's Malakhii, 1927), Patetychna sonata (Sonata path茅tique, 1930), and Vichnyi bunt (Eternal Rebellion, 1932)鈥攁ddresses the stark contradictions between Ukrainian national aspirations and Soviet reality and deals with the inherent conflict between an individual鈥檚 aspirations and a society鈥檚 principles.