In 1812 Prince Shakhovskoy, realizing the musical value of the Ukrainian folksongs, produced what he was pleased to call a Ukrainian vaudeville, the _Kozak Poet_. This employed certain Ukrainian themes and was written in what purported to be the Ukrainian language but Shakhovskoy did not know the vernacular speech and his language was neither Russian nor Ukrainian but a hodge-podge of unreal and assumed forms. The _Kozak Poet_ became very popular and its linguistic defects were largely unnoticed, for there was no fully accepted standard, and his work was highly praised, especially by all those who were seeking for advancement in the Russian service. It displeased Kotlyarevsky, who had already shown some talent in various amateur performances and he determined again to be a forerunner in another field. In 1819 in his own theatre at Poltava, he produced two comedies _Natalka Poltavka_ and _Moskal Charivnik_. (The Muscovite Wizard.) The celebrated actor Mikhail Shchepkin, a Ukrainian by birth, took part in these performances. They were the first real Ukrainian plays written for a modern theatre and they have held their own on the stage for over a century. Let us say frankly that they are not masterpieces of the dramatic art but neither are they to be despised. They are adapted to the stage and it is not only patriotic fervor that has kept them alive. Let us look a little more closely at the _Natalka Poltavka_, “an opera in two acts,” as Kotlyarevsky calls it, though it is really an operetta. It contains many elements that are typical of the Franco-Italian play of the period. The characters are quite conventional. There is the heroine, a beautiful country girl who has been reduced to poverty by the death of her father but who is still honorable and virtuous. She is a type that goes back through the ages into the ancient world. There is the poor orphan boy who was regarded as unworthy to become her husband and who returns rich at the crucial moment. There is the sincere but ambitious mother. All these are stock characters from world drama and if Kotlyarevsky had merely put these types through their paces, he would have laid a good basis for the Ukrainian theatre. He did more than merely imitate the conventional models. He was deeply conscious of the difficulties of his people and if he was not heroic in the later nationalistic sense, he stood for an ideal that was strange in his day and boldly emphasized various qualities of the Ukrainian temper.