Very rarely are the characters personalized. There is He and She and a Girl, a Gentleman and a Lady. They are merely symbols for Oles to indicate the involved and contradictory, self-including and self-excluding universe and man. They deal with the memories of the past and the hopes for the future but Oles realizes that there is no clear line of demarcation and that no one of the alternating and contradictory emotions of the human heart and emotions and mind can ever win a clear and definite triumph. Man and the universe are mysteries and we can only hope to approach their underlying meanings by indirection and symbols. All of this makes them very difficult for theatrical representation but they easily belong in the masterpieces of Ukrainian literature. Again following the tastes of the day, Oles translated into Ukrainian Longfellow’s _Hiawatha_. It was one of the many translations of this poem that were made early in the twentieth century into the Slavonic languages. Of all the masterpieces of American poetry, not one has taken a firmer hold on Slavonic thought and feelings than has the story of the Indian chief and lawgiver. Hiawatha became almost a symbol of America and Oles in making his translation marked an enormous step in the placing of his native literature on the basis of a world literature, in which the world masterpieces existed in adequate and poetical translations. Oles belongs to the greatest masters of his people’s literature but he can never be popular in the sense of a Shevchenko or a Franko. He will always be a poet’s poet, a man whose art requires sympathy and understanding. At times in the height of national indignation or of national jubilation, he emerges from his cultured seclusion and his study of human moods to express something clear and definite. For the most part he remains within the mystic shrine of pure art and deep thinking and feeling as one of those poets who represent the higher aspirations of modern civilized man. The recognition of Oles as a great poet by his people is a sign of the growing maturity of modern Ukrainian literature. It is a sign that the people are securing a new intellectual class, are acquiring a modern culture, are thinking in modern ways, and sharing modern emotions. It is a sign that Ukrainian culture is deepening constantly and that with favorable conditions it would include all those gamuts of emotion and thought that have been fitted into those literatures which have developed naturally and freely over long periods of time. CHAPTER FIFTEEN AFTER 1918