Or let us take _The Family of Les_. Les steals a sack of barley from his wife to sell it at the inn and secure something to drink. She follows him with her two boys, one eight and one ten years old and makes a scene. Then she knocks him down and orders the children to beat their father roundly. Finally she goes home with them in mortal terror that their father will return in the night and take vengeance. All the tragedy of drunkenness is described, all the pathos and despair of the poor mother who cannot work enough to take care of her children and the inn keeper. There is no attempt at presenting a roseate view of peasant life. Misery, need, want, that is all the unfortunates know. It is what has been in the past and all that they can expect in the future. Yet there is more to it than this for again Stefanyk brings out the complicated psychology of an event which might seem at first sight simple. Thus the mother realizes that she could receive assistance from the state if her husband were crippled whereas she could have no relief, if he were merely drunk. Likewise the father is willing to suffer at the hands of his children and even takes off his overcoat so that their light blows can inflict greater pain upon him. Family feeling has taken a strange turn and the mother appears more like a female animal defending her young than she does as a member of a civilized community but Stefanyk gives clue after clue to the varied reactions of the individuals which are by no means simple. We have the same sort of peasant cynicism in the _Blue Booklet_ (or is it really a picturing of the despair that comes when a man is finally broken?). Antin has lost his wife and his two children and alone in the world, he has no solace left but drink. He loses his land and then his little hut and takes the blue employment book to start out in the world alone. He flaunts his poverty in the village inn and names the people to whom he has lost everything but he boasts “I haven’t a cent, but I will drink. I will drink with our people, I’ll go to ruin with them. Let them know how I have left the village. Go, I have the blue booklet in my pocket. Now that is my hut and my field and my gardens. I’m going with it to the end of the world! A booklet from the emperor, I have all doors opened to me. Everywhere. Among gentlemen and Jews and every faith.” Antin has ceased to belong. He has passed out as so many of Stefanyk’s heroes from the normal humdrum life which at best may bring a normal respectable living or at least a slow starvation.