He writes of a transition period when the peasant was left almost entirely alone to stand upon his own two feet and when he was not prepared to do so. The peasant exists under the implacable rule of the erstwhile master and the no more tender mercies of the tavern keeper in the village (usually a Jew) and hence it is that again and again Stefanyk attacks the gentry and the Jews, the two classes in Galician society that seemed to get along, while the hard working peasant gave to both all of his hard earned money. For those peasants who had solved the problem and who were able to live and get along, Stefanyk has nothing to say but in his time the refuge for all of these was ultimately America. The still living ambition to succeed drove the peasant to sell everything and emigrate to the United States or Canada where he could be free to become a man and had some prospects of solving his own problems. This was the period that Stefanyk described and his knowledge of the lives and thoughts of the people he set forth in exquisite and carefully worked out stories in which every word is important. No writer up to this time in Ukrainian had been so economical in his use of material. No one had been so compressed in his style and language. Stefanyk was a supreme artist in a particularly difficult medium. His stories had the finish of a miniature but they are not to be neglected because of the brevity of their material. With the exception of Franko, he was the leading author produced in Western Ukraine during the past seventy-five years and his sense of literary values, his command of language and his appreciation of the significant episodes in life make him an author of whom any literature may well be proud. He dealt with a restricted field but in this field he knew how to show the important elements not only for his people but for humanity and he is one of those authors who under the guise of picturing the down and downtrodden, the failures and the misfits, have known to show them as human beings with many a toil and sorrow but still profoundly human and profoundly worthy of pity and assistance, yet without any attempt to include any form of propaganda and without adding anything that conflicts with pure literature in the strictest sense of the word. CHAPTER FOURTEEN OLES At the end of the nineteenth century a new poetry spread rapidly over Europe. Directly or indirectly this traced its source to the French symbolists and decadents, to Verlaine and Mallarmé and the other writers of that period. Then came the influence of Maeterlinck and the movement was in full course. However, as the movement with its emphasis on aestheticism and beauty and its frequent desire to shock the bourgeoisie spread among the Slavs, it gradually sought a philosophical basis for the new developments.