In his early peasant stories, Kvitka has a rather light and somewhat humorous touch and many of his sketches of peasant life are distinguished by the general gaiety that pervades the atmosphere. Yet he soon became aware of the darker sides of the picture. Thus in the _Unfortunate Oksana_, he gives us the same theme that was used with such great effect by Shevchenko in _Katerina_, the story of the unfortunate girl who is seduced and carried off by a Russian captain who promises to marry her and then abandons her with her baby. She finally returns to her home to her aged mother. Petro, a young man whom she had formerly loved, now becomes her brother and when the captain returns and gives the child, his child, a few coins for nuts, the mother throws them out of the window into the street. The evil desires of the captain have been helped by the pride and the beauty of Oksana who has hoped and dreamed of a husband who would be of higher social station than she is and it is this desire to rise above the other girls of the village that leads to her downfall and tragedy. In the dramas which Kvitka wrote for the Kharkiv stage, he has the same attitude but he very often uses the same mixture of Ukrainian and Russian that was the vogue before the dramas of Kotlyarevsky. Thus in _Shelmenko the Orderly_, the hero who is saved from military service into which he has been plunged by the scheming and unscrupulous village clerk, talks Russian consistently whereas the orderly usually speaks Ukrainian. The way in which the governor unmasks the rascality of his subordinate and punishes him is typical of Kvitka’s attitude toward the imperial regime. The crooked clerk is also a good example of the climbing and corrupt Ukrainians who desire to get away from their peasant past. As the inn keeper says, “The village clerk, a peasant with money, is ashamed to be with his brothers and wastes money for a costly meal and expensive wines,” because he thinks that this represents enlightenment and improvement. Again and again in these plays as in his stories, Kvitka the reactionary does not hesitate to put down the truth as he sees it, even though it runs counter to many of the preconceived ideas which he elsewhere stubbornly defends. He does not idealize many of his characters and almost unconsciously he gives us the attitude of the people to their Russian rulers. Thus Nikita says in this same play, “My father did not teach me to write in order that I should become evil and worthless and he tried to put me on the right path.” It is also interesting that he, speaking Russian, still cannot read and write his native tongue, for he knows only the church language, that arbitrary and artificial system to which Kotlyarevsky had given the death blow with his _Eneida_.