The brief independence of the Ukrainian National Republic and its fall could not fail to have catastrophic results upon the literature. The whole trend of Ukrainian literary development had been to develop along those lines on which the other literatures of the world had travelled. There had been a constant effort to establish close contact between the Ukrainians in Russia and those in Austria-Hungary. Finally there had come with Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, and the later authors at the very end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a group of writers and critics who were familiar with what was going on abroad and had striven to acclimate at home the new methods and ideas as they were rising to prominence. All that was changed. New barriers were erected between the different parts of the dismembered country and these barriers were even more impenetrable than those which had been erected by the severe decrees of Russia at the middle of the nineteenth century. Then it was possible for the Ukrainian authors in Russia to print in Galicia and have their works smuggled back into Russian Ukraine. Now the censorship was ruthless and efficient. Some of the authors as Oles, the last of the great names who remained alive, emigrated to Prague to live the sterile life of an emigré. Lesya Ukrainka had died just before the war, Franko had died before the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Stefanyk soon returned to silence. The early enthusiasm for independence produced a large number of promising and talented young writers who eagerly were adapting futurism and imaginism and the most modern literary movements to the Ukrainian scene. Such authors as Pavlo Tychyna (b. 1891) attracted more than favorable mention and the leading historian of literature, Serhey Yefremiv, in 1923 could speak glowingly of the groups of younger authors who were bidding fair to herald a new and still more glorious period. All this was soon changed. In Poland some scientific and literary work was still possible. The Shevchenko Scientific Society was able to continue. A Ukrainian Scientific Institute was established in Warsaw in 1929 and accomplished a great deal. Such writers as Bohdan Lepky (b. 1872), professor of Ukrainian literature at the University of Krakow, was able to continue writing and a number of promising young authors as Ulas Samchuk appeared. At the same time the Czechoslovak government encouraged the formation of a Ukrainian University and Institute in Prague. But it was hardly the time for fruitful work. The dark shadow of Fascism was beginning to appear upon the horizon and threatening an overturn of life as it had long been known.