And those abuses were heavy. The rights of the nobles were construed so as to deny to the peasants the most elementary human rights and the serfs in Russia were probably never more bitterly oppressed than they were in the last decades of serfdom. The economic pressure of progress upon the nobles was so great that many of them, to satisfy their supposed financial needs and to keep up with the procession of culture, found it necessary to squeeze the last drop of income out of their serfs and the more the landowners desired the comforts of the nineteenth century, the more they were forced to inhuman devices to collect the wherewithal. Shevchenko in his last works keenly felt this oppression. He had passed through the school of experience and after he had been able to compare the life in the capital with the hardships of the peasants, he spoke out strongly against this oppression. His was not the only voice that was raised but it carried him over from the Romantic period to the age of realism. The author that was to be the spokesman of this new period in prose was Maria Vilinskaya, who was born in 1834 of a Ukrainian landowning family which had moved from Ukraine to Orel in Russia. She was educated in the Kharkiv pension, one of the fashionable girl’s schools of the period. When she returned to Orel, she met and married Opanas Markovich, who was there in exile as a former member of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius. The newly married couple returned to Ukraine in 1851 and for about a decade they lived in Chernihiv, Kiev, and Nemiriv. She became interested in ethnography and began to study the peasant life, customs, and language. Naturally the young wife became convinced of the evils of serfdom and it was this that launched her into literature. In 1852 Turgenev had published in book form his _Memoirs of a Sportsman_ and these tales of peasant life speedily became the standard for the new realistic treatment of the peasant existence. The Tsar Alexander II read and reread them and it was often said that they inspired him to issue the decree of emancipation. Yet it is to be noted that Turgenev had contented himself with picturing the peasants as human beings and had not laid stress upon those phases of life that were most repulsive to the human conscience. He had secured his effects by emphasizing the humanity of the peasants rather than the brutality of the landowners and thereby he had definitely reached the higher level of literature which many of his followers failed to attain.