Let us take _Marusia_ as an example. Marusia, a young Ukrainian girl and a paragon of all virtues, is the daughter of a fairly well-to-do farmer. She falls in love with a poor young man, who, as an orphan, has to serve in the army. To escape this and to make money to buy himself off from this obligation, he leaves home. This moves the heart of old Naum, Marusia’s father, and he consents to the wedding but sends the young man on a business trip before the marriage takes place. The lovers part in the cemetery and Marusia promises to meet him there. Soon after she is taken ill and dies and her funeral is being held as the future bridegroom returns. Broken-hearted, he gives up his career and becomes a priest but after a short time he dies of grief in a monastery. The story is filled with ethnographical details. Kvitka knew the colorful life of the peasants and the vast number of customs that were carried out with almost religious scruples and he inserted them into his tale. We learn of all the ritual of courtship and of love making and in the hands of a less skillful writer, these details would make the story drag. Kvitka avoids the danger and _Marusia_ is one of the best tales of village life on its brighter side. Yet the heroine is almost cloyingly sweet. There is little or nothing of the earthly about her and she is a typical heroine of the sentimental era which was attendant upon the introduction of Romanticism. This fashion had been started by Zhukovsky in Russian with his translation of the German ballads and now Kvitka adapted it to Ukrainian. The theme bears striking similarities to the contemporary Czech ballads of Erben and Celakovsky where we find the same over-sentimentality particularly in the case of young girls. In his tales Kvitka had adapted this ballad material to prose and strange as it may seem, they really antedate similar works in French, German and Russian. This heavily Russianized nobleman who admired and almost worshipped the tsar wrote in Ukrainian a very strong plea for the people and produced realistic peasants who shared the thoughts and emotions of their fellows. He knew the life of the peasants around Kharkiv and depicted them sympathetically and in glowing colors. He also noticed the differences between the Ukrainians and the Russians. He shows it in their reactions to various motives and he makes at least a passing reference to the hostility or at least the aversion that existed between them. Thus Vasil, the lover of Marusia, says when he tells about his entrance into the business world, “I got along at once with my companions, although they were Moskals.” In the same way in another of his early stories, _The Soldier’s Portrait_, the peasant artist who takes his painting to the fair for criticism, is not impressed when a Russian is deceived by its realism, “for it is no feat to deceive a Moskal.”