Born a serf and later a soldier in the Russian army, he accomplished with few opportunities for formal education an amazing amount. He took the Ukrainian language as it had been developed by Kotlyarevsky and his followers and by the force of his own genius made it into a language capable of expressing the most refined emotions and fully adequate to all the needs of modern literature. He voiced in that language and in no other the thoughts and aspirations of his people. He had completely separated Ukrainian from Russian and started it along an independent course and he had made himself its greatest literary master. Taras Shevchenko, the son of a serf with his fanatical faith in the victory of democratic ideals and despite all obstacles, made himself one of the great poets of the Slavonic world and his fame will live as long as that of any of his contemporaries in the other literatures. No one of them believed more firmly or voiced more clearly an unyielding and uncompromising belief that democracy, truth and freedom would win the day and no one worked harder or suffered more to bring it about. CHAPTER SIX PANTALEIMON KULISH Shevchenko was a poet by the grace of God and a genius who set the path for the Ukrainian people. Endowed with an iron will and firmly devoted to the principles in which he believed, he was able to undergo all the hardships of his sad life without giving way or varying the course on which he had embarked. Not so with Pantaleimon Kulish who was great in his positive activity but unfortunately equally great in his defects and errors. He devoted himself to the cause of Ukraine but over and over again some peculiar mode of thinking cast over his reputation a shadow which was easily avoidable. It makes his figure unusual and pathetic rather than tragic. He stood the buffets of fate but it is always difficult to discover exactly what he sought from life. Kulish was born of a small landowning Kozak family in the district of Hlukhiv in the government of Chernihiv July 27, 1819 and was thus only five years younger than Shevchenko. He first learned to read in Church Slavonic from a young cousin and as a child he was greatly influenced by a neighboring landowner Ulyana Muzhikovskaya who impressed him as a highly superior being and almost a god.