In 1798 there suddenly appeared in St. Petersburg, a volume entitled the _Eneida_, written by one Ivan Kotlyarevsky. It was a travesty on Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the Trojans were depicted as the wandering Kozaks who had been expelled from the Sich less than twenty-five years before. Furthermore the volume was written in the popular dialect of the province of Poltava where the author was serving as an official of the government. The revival of the Ukrainian spirit had commenced. All possible honor must be paid to Kotlyarevsky for his audacious effort which was crowned with so much success and it would have been a godsend for Ukraine, had any one a century earlier had the courage and the intellectual independence to have made the same attempt. The tragedy of Ukraine had been, as we have seen, largely caused by the fact that the scholars of Kiev had adopted only a reactionary attitude toward the language question. They had striven so hard for the preservation of Church Slavonic that they had ignored the revival of the vernacular in both Poland and Russia. Even Skovoroda with all of his inspired teachings as to the rights of the individual had not ventured to break this old and stultifying tradition. Kotlyarevsky did and the results were at once visible. Yet there was more to this innovation than the mere publishing of a book in the Ukrainian language. The spirit of Europe had been changing for over a quarter of a century and consciously or not Kotlyarevsky was a reflection of that change. Not only he among the Ukrainians but such men as Dositey Obradovich among the Serbs and Dobrovsky for the Czechs reflected the new attitude. All of these men were products of the Enlightenment, that interesting movement of the eighteenth century which endeavored to apply the rule of reason to human affairs. They were often well trained in the classical languages and their cool intellectual powers fitted well with the powdered wigs and the stately manners of the courts of the enlightened despots. There was much in the writings of the Kievan school which encouraged a man like Kotlyarevsky. The various comedies produced in the school, the comical intermezzos, and all the varied performances which had dragged on at weary length in pseudo-Church Slavonic, all could be cited as prototypes for a whimsical treatment of a classical theme.