At first these Kievan monks busied themselves in Moscow only with purely religious writings. Thus Epifany Slavinetsky prepared over 150 works, most of which consisted of translations from the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers and also of short introductions to various sacred writings which he translated. This was all that could be developed at first in view of the prejudices of the Muscovites. It was not long, however, before these Kievan scholars gradually undertook to introduce to the court of Alexis all the various forms of literature which were practiced in Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine. As we have seen, the Kiev Academy had a very limited theological outlook. It was more interested in maintaining the Orthodox faith and in carrying on polemical disputes with the Polish Catholics than it was in building up a high and widely varying secular culture. It imitated and put into Orthodox form the already antiquated scholasticism of Poland, which was itself all too often a pale reflection of what had been done in western Europe a few centuries earlier. The old miracle plays were reworked, comic and sometimes coarse scenes were added to suit the manners of the time, little interludes were composed, and there sprang up a rather uninspired but still active school of drama illustrating biblical themes and filled with moralizing and didactic teaching. It was in general a picture of the European literatures in the late Renaissance, without that spark of life and genius that had lifted English, French and Italian literatures to the heights of the sixteenth century and it was far below what had been achieved by the Polish writers of the same century, and then neglected. All this literature forms a dreary period but it was infinitely more advanced than was anything that was found in Moscow. As the various genres were made available in that capital, they seemed daringly novel to the younger Muscovites, who were blissfully unaware of how far Western Europe had advanced in recent decades. As a result there developed in the latter half of the seventeenth century a craze at Moscow for the Ukrainian literature of the day and Ukrainian monks and laymen who made their way to the Russian capital found themselves in constant demand. Ukrainian scholasticism dominated the reigns of Alexis and the following tsars, and students of Russian literature and history have often failed to emphasize the importance of this period as the first step in the Europeanization of the country.