He is considered to be one of the lead figures of the Executed Renaissance; he was murdered by the NKVD during Stalin’s Great Terror.

During his school years he published several short verses and epigrams in students' hand-written magazines which gave him a certain degree of fame among his peers.

In 1913 for the first time he writes a play At fish catching (Russian: На рыбной ловле) which later became the base for his comedy That was how perished Huska (Ukrainian: Отак загинув Гуска).

After the demobilization in 1920 he worked as an instructor for several bodies of People's Education in Oleshky uyezd as well as edited the newspaper Chervonyi Shliakh in Zinovyevsk.

Later that year he moved to Kharkiv where he met with various prominent Ukrainian writers and poets such as Mykola Khvyliovyi, Ostap Vyshnia, Yuriy Yanovskyi, Volodymyr Sosiura, and many others.

[1] During that time his plays Narodnyi Malakhiy, Myna Mazailo, Pathetic sonata were recognized as hostile to the communist regime.

At the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow (17 August – 1 September 1934) Mykola Kulish was publicly denounced as a bourgeois-nationalist playwright.

Particularly critical of him was Ivan Kulyk, who also mentioned the theatrical troop of Les Kurbas as one who performed Kulish's plays.

In December 1934, after the burial of his friend Ivan Dniprovskyi, Kulish was arrested by the agents of NKVD and sent to the Solovki prison camp in the White Sea.