He bewails in _Prichepa_ the lack of a true enlightenment among the Ukrainians and he summarizes the situation in the following passage (p. 110ff), “Who in Kiev does not remember the time before the Sevastopol war? It was a heavy time for Ukraine, it was its bad time. The ordinary people groaned in heavy slavery under the _pans_, compelled to be silent and suffer, worse than before Khmelnitsky. And for every groan it was tortured in the Muscovite manner. Ukraine had forgotten its historical tradition and could not by knowledge reach its lost thoughts. On both sides of the Dnieper they were overwhelmed by foreign customs, in foreign skins, they heard a foreign tongue and forgot their own. Knowledge perished, education fell, remaining only in the scholastic Latin theological schools. The university knowledge was only the alphabet of European culture, cut on the official measure. This knowledge wished to train the people into Muscovites, for the army, for the administration. From the Ukrainian university and other schools came out bribers, grafting officials, unjust judges, who made the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent, those conservative teachers and professors, who twisted history on the Moscow orders, those Moskal officers who forgot their own people for profit. And the people were at forced labor, and the Polish and Muscovite landowners were stripping the last hide from Ukraine, at that time when our sincere Ukrainians for their young Ukrainian idea were sitting in slavery, in the distant Muscovite north. It was a hard time, may it never return!” In the _Clouds_ which first appeared in 1874, Levitsky tried to show something of this period and of the evil results that attended the Russianization of the scholars of the day. Here the situation is reversed. The learned professor Dashkovich, entering the Theological Academy of Kiev as the only Ukrainian amid a group of Russians, lives an idealistic life but he becomes finally so interested in his philosophical studies that he forgets his native Ukraine and loses touch with his native village. Meanwhile as an adherent of Pan-Slavism, he talks incessantly about the Slavonic question in the Balkans but cannot see that there is anything to do at home. His daughter, a beautiful Ukrainian girl, is sent to fashionable Russian schools and comes out as a wilful and cynical Russian aristocratic girl who is perfectly satisfied to make a loveless marriage with a rich and distinguished colonel. She has been in love with a young and patriotic Ukrainian Radyuk, who wears Ukrainian costumes and speaks in public and private the Ukrainian language and who even tries to convert his beloved to the Ukrainian cause, but she rejects him because he is not fashionable enough and frivolous enough for her, despite the fact that she really loves him.