Take the conversation between Petro and the _Vyborny_ and the _Vozny_. Petro had been to the theatre in Kharkiv and had seen there the drama of Shakhovskoy which was creating so much excitement. He boldly declared that he could not understand it because the Moskal did not know how to write the Ukrainian language or draw a Ukrainian character. Here he definitely expresses the author’s sense of literary criticism. It is very interesting that Petro is fully conscious of his difference from the Moskals and that the _Vozny_, the judicial official, no more educated than Petro, corrects the historical mistakes which Shakhovskoy made about Ukraine. In the _Moskal Charivnik_, Kotlyarevsky also pokes fun at those Ukrainians who endeavor to turn themselves into Russians but this play is far weaker and less clear in its construction. In the _Ode to Prince Kurakin_, he stresses the same points and the hardships of the people. Both of his dramas contain snatches of poetry, sometimes purely original and sometimes a reworking of the poems of Skovoroda. They end with a chorus as in the traditional dramas of the day and they show Kotlyarevsky’s command of other forms of Ukrainian verse as well as the epic. The striking characteristic of all of Kotlyarevsky’s work is the democratic character of his writings. The nobility had been pretty well Russianized and it was only the common people who preserved the native language. However, while he depicted them in a kindly humorous way, he never lost an opportunity to speak out strongly about the peasant virtues and to emphasize that democratic tradition which had always been so strong in Ukraine and in the lives of the Kozaks. Thus Natalka in her talk with the _Vozny_ definitely refuses to marry him, because she is of poor peasant stock and he comes from the gentry. There is hardly a literature which took its rise in such a clearly democratic atmosphere as did modern Ukrainian and Kotlyarevsky from the very beginning set the keynote which was to be followed by all of his important successors. Yet with it all Kotlyarevsky did not present the Ukrainian cause in a manner that would get him into trouble with the authorities. He was not a political agitator nor a man to menace by his actions the social order of the day. He was a literary innovator and the creator of the Ukrainian language and like most of the early leaders of the Slavonic revival in various countries, he did not work in the field of politics. He did not aim at reviving the political independence or the political system which had been overthrown by the Russian Empress. At that time Ukrainian culture had been so buffeted and demoralized that the first and most essential factor was the creation of a new spirit and a new self-respect.