Thus, by the time the rumbles of the Revolution of 1848 began to be heard, Ukrainian literary and linguistic revival was well under way. The literature had reached in the works of Shevchenko the level of the other Slavonic literatures. It had done this despite the disapproval of the Russian literary critics, especially Belinsky, who affected to believe that there was no real call for the erection of Little Russian, as he loved to call Ukrainian, into a literary language. His judgments on the _Kobzar_ and the _Haydamaki_ are almost ludicrous in their efforts to prove that Shevchenko was only a peasant trying to show off before Russian society. A few years late Apollon Grigoryev unhesitatingly placed him on a level with Pushkin and Mickiewicz, but he was exceptional in his willingness to follow his own ideas rather than the official promulgations of the intelligentsia. In another field the Ukrainian revival went far: the field of ethnology and of folklore. The Romantic temperament, aided and abetted by the teachings of Herder, turned its attention to the manners and customs of the village. There grew up a veritable harvest of investigators who, whether in fiction form as in the case of Hrihori Kvitka-Osnovyanenko or in the form of scientific treatises, pictured every aspect of Ukrainian life. These men, and some of them were to be found among the Russianized gentry, emphasized the differences that existed in the manners and customs between the Ukrainians and the Great Russians. They noted with care the differences in the construction of the village houses, the arrangements of the houses and the farms, the embroideries, the legends, the folklore. They collected the popular songs, the dumy, the historical poems. Anything and everything that marked the life of the people in all of its manifestations they willingly committed to paper and step by step they gathered and preserved a picture of life in a Ukrainian village as it existed in the days of serfdom. It is easy to overlook this kind of work and to regard it as the mere product of literary men and scholars. Yet the works of Maksimovich, of Tsertelev, and of many more served as a preliminary step to the raising of political aspirations. The study of the past carried on both by Ukrainians and by the Russian authorities brought to light much forgotten information. Thus the Governor General Bibikov in 1843 founded the Kiev Archaeological Commission, on which Shevchenko was for a time employed. This aimed to collect information on the past, to secure paintings of old buildings, and to supply details of history. It is highly significant that a firsthand knowledge of the past obtained in this work brought many of the young scholars and artists to realize more clearly than they had done before the historical value of many of the old Ukrainian writings which had existed up to that time only in manuscript.