Before this in 1812 he had become the director of the theatre in Kharkiv and this inspired him to write dramas and especially comedies. In 1831, he gave up most of his interests in Kharkiv and retired to his estate at his native village of Osnova, from which he took the pen name for his Ukrainian writings, Osnovyanenko. From that time he came to the city only once a year to carry out his duties as Marshal of the local nobility. Thus absorbed in society and his estates, he died in 1843 at a ripe old age. It is curious that in his later days the very success which he had won for the Russian translations of his Ukrainian works, many of which he had made himself, led him back to Russian and he again tried without success to achieve fame in that language, while he prepared Ukrainian translations of his Russian books. The result was a weakening of the value of his works, for it can be truthfully said that Kvitka wrote nothing of importance except in Ukrainian. To a large extent Kvitka was typical of the vegetable existence of the nobles of the day. The timeless life on the big estates gave to the masters abundant and placid happiness and isolated them from the life that was proceeding at an ever increasing tempo in both Ukraine and Russia. Kvitka maintained the old conservative attitude toward life and was always the talented amateur and the respectable reactionary in his views. Thus in his _Letters to my dear Countrymen_ which appeared in the thirties, he definitely set forth a type of reactionary doctrine which had long since been repudiated by the great writers of the same period in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He unhesitatingly declares “As God is heaven, so is he (the tsar) on earth” and he explains to his countrymen of the government of Kharkiv the glories and the virtue and the divine origin of the imperial regime. Radical critics attacked him for his views but we must never forget that throughout his entire life he was a provincial nobleman who accepted uncritically the slogans of the day as they were accepted in the Russianized circles of Kharkiv society. If these _Letters_ could be taken as the whole of Kvitka’s work, he would hardly deserve mention but it was only a small part of his activity. _The Little Russian Tales_ published in Moscow in 1834-37 and in Kharkiv in 1841 were very different.