From the Bible to Shakespeare: Pantelejmon Kuliš (1819–97) and the Formation of Literary Ukrainian

Ukrainian Studies

by Andrii Danylenko

This is the first English-language study of the translations of the Bible and Shakespeare into vernacular Ukrainian by Pantelejmon Kuliš (1819–1897), a true Ukrainian maverick in the national revival of his country and a precursor of the modern understanding of Ukrainian literature. In this study, Kuliš’s translations are discussed in tandem with the time and people engaged in their assessment. As a result, the Ukrainian Bible and Shakespeare prove crucial to tracing the contours of a full and complete picture of the development of literary Ukrainian in the two historical parts of Ukraine—Galicia and Dnieper Ukraine—from the mid-nineteenth century onward.

Winner of the 2017 American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages Best Book in Linguistics

Winner of the 2017 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Best Book in Language, Literature, and Culture


Andrii Danylenko is Professor at Pace University in New York. He is the editor and author of several books on Slavic linguistics and philology as well as dozens of studies on a wide array of topics ranging from Indo-European to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to standard Ukrainian.

472 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2016