In his _Grammar_ Kulish set the standard for the orthography of the Ukrainian language and his decisions were accepted as final for many years. He made himself the authority on all kinds of linguistic and grammatical and stylistic questions, and hoped that his work would be employed in the proposed Ukrainian school system. He followed this book with simpler writings intended for the common people. The _Black Council_ was his chief work of fiction. It dealt with the period immediately after the death of Khmelnitsky, when the various Kozak colonels were competing for the hetmanship and when Poland and Moscow had divided the country between the right and left banks of the Dnieper. He emphasized the vivid contrasts between the manners and customs of the officer class and the more unruly and undisciplined members of the Zaporozhian Sich as Kyrylo Tur, and although he pays tribute to their loyalty and fidelity to Kozak traditions and to the bravery and heroic conduct which they demonstrated on all occasions, there is always a lurking feeling in the mind of the reader that Kulish did not after all consider these Kozaks of the Sich as the real bearers of a national culture of a very high type. With the love affair between Petro Shramenko and Lesya Cherivanivna, Kulish remained true to the type of the romantic novel as it was then understood in Europe. There are the usual scenes of adventure for the hero, the battles, the feasts, the feats of arms, that we are accustomed to expect. There is also a certain democratic tinge to the novel. On the whole it is a good piece of work and it was only at the very end in an epilogue in the Russian translation that he alluded to the certainty that it was the undisciplined actions of the Kozaks that had precipitated the loss of Ukrainian independence and had ruined the country. In 1861 his brother-in-law Bilozersky secured permission to publish a Ukrainian journal at St. Petersburg, the _Osnova_, and Kulish, while forbidden by the censor to take over control of the publication, was its main contributor. It gave him an opportunity for sociological and ethnographical studies and it also gave opportunity to his enemies to criticize him, for in one unfortunate article, he declared that the hetmanate was a tree rotten internally and he asserted that the Ukrainians should not regret its destruction. Kostomariv, an infinitely more careful and better scholar, agreed in part with Kulish but he emphasized that the method of its destruction was the important factor and that this had been more harmful to Ukraine than the destruction itself.