There was more to it than this. The Russian scholars under the influence of Lomonosov carefully adapted to the new Russian literature the ideals of Boileau and the French scholars who created the high, low and middle styles of literary language. The low was to form the language of comedy and of humorous episodes. It was to be free from those survivals of Church Slavonic that still maintained a definite position in the odes and tragedies of Russian literature. There were many burlesques of classical authors being published in Russian. Ippolit Bogdanovich, a Ukrainian writing in Russian, had metamorphosized LaFontaine’s _Amours de Psyche_ into a Russian form. Free adaptation was the order of the day and if an author were to create humor by the use of the vernacular, how much better it was for a Ukrainian gentleman to employ the real vernacular and to transform the characters of Aeneas and his followers into the real Kozaks who were even then wandering around the Black Sea? That was one possible source of inspiration but there was another which was rising with increasing vehemence throughout Europe. For centuries, the goal of literature was to appeal to the educated and noble classes by describing in elevated language the feelings and the emotions of the nobles and the more elevated and developed personalities. The common people had vanished from literature, except in comic interludes. A new trend started with the work of Jean Jacques Rousseau who taught the superiority of the simple and natural man to the pattern of civilization and sophistication. His ideas were developed in the literary sphere by Johann Gottfried Herder, who emphasized the value of folksongs and of the poetry of so called primitive nations. Herder’s influence resulted in the collecting of folksongs from all the people of Europe. Among these the gatherings of Serb folksongs were especially prominent. Thus by the end of the eighteenth century, interest in the ideas, the poetry and the customs of the various peoples hitherto ignored had become one of the leading components of the new studies. It was thus that the _Eneida_ appeared at the psychological moment when interest in the people was reaching a new high and when the French Revolution was already disturbing the settled political situation. The work revealed Kotlyarevsky both as a masterly adapter of the _Aeneid_ and also as an authority on the manners and customs of the Kozaks. With its jesting and serious tone, it aroused attention among many of the descendants of the Kozak officers who had already become Russianized, and at the same time it fitted so well within the official and tolerated literary bounds that it was impossible for the authorities to regard it as revolutionary and administer any punishment to its bold author.