Yet even this scientific work, published for the most part in Russian, still seemed suspicious to the Imperial government. Anything which demanded any cultural rights for the Ukrainian people or mentioned differences between the Great Russians and the Ukrainians or Little Russians or South Russians seemed to be dangerous separatism. This was the more striking because the scholars of Moscow and St. Petersburg at the same time were emphasizing the great differences between the cultures of Moscow and Kiev in the past, were emphasizing that the culture of Kiev was often more Polish than Russian and were teaching their own students, with governmental approval, that the Kievans who came to Moscow in the seventeenth century were to all intents and purposes foreigners who were ill received by the masses of the Muscovites. At the same time the force of public opinion among the radical intelligentsia was emphasizing the fact that Russian literature belonged to the areas around the capitals. It is interesting that except for Count Alexis K. Tolstoy, who advocated the point of view that Kiev represented the European side of the Russians, there were practically no novels written during this entire period depicting the life of the people of Ukraine. After the death of Gogol in 1852, it was possible to rummage into the highways and byways of Russian literature without becoming aware that Kiev and its adjoining regions even existed as part of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. It is fair to say that never, even in the most stringent period of Muscovite isolation, was Russian literature so confined to Great Russian territory as in the Golden Age of the Russian novel and of the intelligentsia, that is the period between 1840 and 1881.