For a long while Stefanyk gave up writing and then during the exciting years after the First World War he returned to literature. His later stories were of the same type as the earlier ones. They had the same compressed form, the same careful workmanship but there was something different about them. He had grown during the years of silence and had come to find more positive qualities in his poor folk. He shows their sufferings in the war, when the peasants of Western Ukraine came to feel toward the Russians, the Moskali, what had been mentioned again and again in the writings of the people from Great Ukraine. Thus in _Maria_, the old woman comes to meet the Kozaks in the village and she is surprised that they being Ukrainian also respect Shevchenko. In the _Sons_, an old peasant realizes that his sons have gone to fight for Ukraine. On his return from seeing the last one off, he finds his wife dead before the painting of the Blessed Virgin and in a fit of simple religion, not without a bitter undertone, he appeals to the Blessed Virgin to care for his home for he has given not one but two sons for a great cause. There has come a new enlightenment in the village, a new feeling that the people have some part to play other than to be mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. It is a sign of the deepening of the national consciousness, of that tendency that Franko had hoped for and in which he had believed. The Ukraine is now a real thing even to the humblest and the most underprivileged and along with this there is a growing tendency of hostility to the Polish landowners and bureaucrats. They had hardly appeared in the earlier stories where Stefanyk had been describing merely little sketches of peasant life taken without any background except the misery and suffering of the village. It brings about a new atmosphere of hope, a deeper confidence in the capacity of the peasants. There is more thought, more conscious guiding of their own affairs. They are no longer satisfied to accept their fate without questioning and to pass from the scene without a murmur. Yet they are fundamentally the same people. With the same temptations and vices.