With the abolition of serfdom, there vanished from Ukrainian life the worst abuses which the earlier writers had experienced and described. The ruthless floggings were mitigated or abolished. It was no longer possible for the master to separate husband and wife or parents and children to suit a passing fancy or to indulge a mad caprice. A more humane spirit grew up in the villages and the old system gradually changed. The millenium was not reached, however, and new difficulties were added to the peasant lot, because with the abolition of the almost autocratic power of the landlord, the economic position of the peasant often became more complicated. Where he had formerly worked out his obligations, often at terrific cost to his well being, now it was necessary for him to secure by his labor the necessary money to pay his new obligations to the state and the land owner. The reform had not been far-reaching enough to put all the peasants on the road to material prosperity and the new conditions demanded a new type of literature. The author who handled this new period was Ivan Levitsky, better known under his pen name of Nechuy. He was born in 1838, the very year when Shevchenko received his freedom and four years after the birth of Marko Vovchok. He was educated in the theological academy at Kiev, the very school which had been made famous in the seventeenth century by Peter Mohyla, and then he became a teacher of the Russian language, history and geography in the higher elementary schools. Here he toiled until he was able to retire on a pension. He still continued to live in Kiev and gradually became almost a recluse. He drifted away from active contact with his fellow men and gradually slid into an obscurity which was aided by his devotion to his own theories of what Ukrainian literature should be. Finally the Central Rada of the free Ukrainian Republic gave him a pension in 1918 as its first gift to a needy writer, but it was too late for it to be of service and he died in a very short time. Levitsky was induced to write in Ukrainian through his reading of Shevchenko’s _Kobzar_ and also by the influence of the _Osnova_, the journal which Kulish had founded in 1861. These models determined the course of his life and led him to prose and the social novel. In a few cases he attempted to deal with the life of the peasants under serfdom as in _Mikola Dzherya_ but that period was definitely passed with the ending of serfdom and he turned his attention to the contemporary post-abolition scenes. His first works were published in 1867 in the _Pravda_, a journal appearing in Lviv, and for many years during the time when the Ukrainian language could not be used in Russia for the publication of books, his works appeared regularly in the Galician capital.