[2] After studying at the Poltava Theological Seminary (1780–1789), he worked as a tutor for the gentry at rural estates, where he became familiar with Ukrainian folk life and the peasant vernacular.

In 1812, during the French invasion of Russia he organized the 5th Ukrainian Cossack Regiment in the town of Horoshyn (Khorol uyezd, Poltava Governorate) under the condition that it will be left after the war as a permanent military formation.

In 1818 together with Vasyl Lukashevych [uk] , V. Taranovsky, and others he became a member of the Poltava Freemasonry Lodge Liubov do istyny (Love of truth).

In particular, its main model was the earlier poem Virgilieva Eneida, vyvorochennaya naiznaku (Virgil's Aeneid turned inside out) published in 1791 by the Russian poet Nikolay Osipov (completed by Alexander Kotelnitsky), but Kotliarevsky's work is absolutely different.

[9] It reflects the memory of the recently destroyed Zaporozhian Sich[10] and Cossack Hetmanate and the current high point of Russian-imposed serfdom in Ukraine.

[7] Pavlo Petrenko writes that Kotliarevsky's worldview was "guided by moral rather than by sociopolitical criteria, and his sympathy for the socially and nationally oppressed Ukrainian peasantry was subordinated to his loyalty to tsarist autocracy.

"[7] According to Pavlo Petrenko, "Kotliarevsky's influence is evident not only in the works of his immediate successors (Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Taras Shevchenko, Yakiv Kukharenko, K. Topolia, Stepan Pysarevsky, and others), but also in the ethnographic plays of the second half of the 19th century and in Russian (the works of the ethnic Ukrainians Nikolai Gogol and Vasilii Narezhny) and Belarusian (the anonymous Eneida navyvarat [The Aeneid Travestied]) literature.

Numerous boulevards and streets in Ukrainian cities are named after the poet, the largest ones being in Kyiv, Poltava, Chernihiv, Vinnytsia, Khmelnytskyi, Chernivtsi, Pryluky, Lubny and Berdychiv.

[citation needed] The first few stanzas of Kotliarevsky's Eneida were translated into English by Wolodymyr Semenyna [uk] and published in the Ukrainian-American newspaper Ukrainian Weekly on 20 October 1933.