In Polish we find the _Maria_ of Malczewski and in Russian we have Gogol’s _Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka_ and the collection of _Mirgorod_ with the great story of _Taras Bulba_, a brilliant description of Kozak life as Gogol conceived it. Yet Gogol had an attitude of unbending loyalty to the Russian Tsars. He knew relatively little of Ukrainian history, although he was proud of the fact that his family had been famous in the Sich and his father had written several plays in Ukrainian after the tradition of Kotlyarevsky. It was necessary to widen the range of the Ukrainian subject matter and to create new forms of writing but this was no easy task under the conditions of the day. As at Poltava, so at Kharkiv there was a great interest in things Ukrainian, especially after the foundation of the university there in 1805 but there was a general aristocratic tone to the entire social life and the same tradition that Kotlyarevsky had opposed at Poltava. Despite these handicaps certain steps in the development of the literature were taken by Hrihori Kvitka, a landowner of the neighborhood of Kharkiv. He was born in 1778 and received the usual superficial education of the day and of his class. He had little regular instruction and that little was entirely in Russian. Largely through the influence of Skovoroda, he became deeply religious at the age of twelve and wanted to enter a monastery. His parents prevented it and they finally put him in the Russian army. In a short time he left it and entered the civil service. Then he tried the army again and when he was twenty he entered a monastery as a lay brother. This life too proved uncongenial and finally he left it and returned home to busy himself with the social life of the day and to dabble in intellectual pursuits. Of course he read the _Eneida_ but it did not inspire him to imitate it or to use the Ukrainian language. Instead of that, he began to write in Russian under the pen name of Falaley Povinukhin. His stories attracted a certain amount of attention in Kharkiv but they made no impression on the literary world of the two capitals. They were merely stories written by a provincial Russian for a provincial audience. Kvitka would have remained unknown and unnoticed, had chance not led him to try his native Ukrainian. He was joking one day with a writer who was endeavoring to compose in his native tongue and Kvitka asked him to write something serious and sentimental in it. When the author replied that the language was unfit for such subjects, Kvitka became displeased and to prove his friend wrong, he decided to write himself some stories in Ukrainian and soon he turned out two of his main works, _The Soldier’s Portrait_ and _Marusia_. Their success was immediate in Ukrainian circles and it was not long before they were translated into Russian and brought the author that fame which he had never achieved in his Russian writings.