In the _Institutka_, we have another picture of a cruel and abusive woman who has received the best education that her family can give her and who returns from school only to abuse her mother and to wreak her vengeance on every one that crosses her, including her husband and her peasants. It is a lurid story of human meanness which spares no one. The story is told by a peasant woman Ustina, a maid of the Institutka, who has seen her husband forced into the army for a long term of years because he had endeavored to protect her when she was being unjustly flogged. Ustina is compelled to go to the city and work as a servant but even this is preferable to life on the old estate under the iron hand of the inhuman mistress. Marko Vovchok’s understanding of the emotions and the feelings of the peasant women struck a new note in Ukrainian and Russian literature. Her feminine instincts told her how they reacted to the hardships of their lives and perhaps no author has better expressed the disastrous effects of serfdom upon the women who suffered from it and the women who profited by it. In addition to these tales of human suffering and brutality, she also wrote a number, setting out in narrative form some of the Ukrainian folktales and superstitions. Thus in the _Chary_, (_the Charms_) a sorceress succeeds in changing her rival into a bird and marrying the abandoned husband. Later when the bird returns to the old home, she persuades her innocent husband to shoot it and the dying bird changes back into the wife. The story is told simply and the author succeeds in imparting to it that unreal atmosphere that makes us regard it as a real event. So too in _Lemerivna_. A rich, young Kozak loves a girl and woos her. The girl refuses to love him in return but her mother, who is mindful of the qualities of the young man, finally forces her into the wedding. After it is over and he starts with her for her new home, she commits suicide and he goes off and is never heard of again. Marko Vovchok is easily the outstanding prose writer of her period, the age just before the liberation of the serfs. She was one of the group that cooperated in producing the state of mind that reformed the evil and deserves all credit for it. It is only a pity and a great loss to Ukrainian literature that she gave it up almost as soon as she had achieved success. She was another of those talents that were so frequent in Russian Ukraine who were swept from the vernacular literature of the land into the colossal sea of Russian and who then never justified their work, either by the quality of their productions or the benefit that they may have hoped to give to the people. CHAPTER EIGHT IVAN LEVITSKY-NECHUY