The great bulk of his works dealt with the unjust and burdensome conditions of life immediately after the liberation of the serfs. Thus for example in _The Baba Paraska and the Baba Palashka_, we have a picture of the ignorance and lack of education that was hindering the economic development of Ukraine. The _Buried Alive_ is another example of the hardships of the people and in general most of his characters are completely overwhelmed by existence and represent the failures who are unable to master life and work out their own salvation. It is not for nothing that in one of his tales, the _Zaporozhians_, he represents the return of one of the old time women after a lapse of a century to the same village where she had formerly lived. She finds that life has become even more intolerable than it had been in the days of the Hetman state, when at least there was the possibility for a determined character to break away and live on the steppes a wild and tempestuous but free existence. Levitsky also noted the beginning of the growth of factories in Ukraine, especially in the _Burlachka_. In these conditions were worse than in the villages. Long hours, utter lack of protection, miserable pay and impossible living conditions marked the life of the poor unfortunates whom need had driven to the new life. It was worse than the old slavery which had been abolished with serfdom, for in the industrial communities there were not even those safeguards and that healthy atmosphere and fresh air that had existed in the village. He noted too the other evils as militarism and the effect of army service that were weighing heavily upon the people as in the _Two Moscow Women_, but the thing that concerned him the most was the gap between the intelligentsia and the people and the great dangers which the former ran of being absorbed and remade by the two “aristocratic” cultures, the Polish and the Russian. There seemed to be a constant stream of young and vital forces sapped away from the people by the insidious power of example and of material reward.