If literature in Western Ukraine was to find itself, it could do so only through the efforts of some one who was born and reared there and who understood the situation and the lives and thoughts of the people as a native and a true son of the country. Just as the literature of Great Ukraine had been responsive in some degree to the moods of Russian literature, so in Western Ukraine similar influence would be exerted by the various schools of Polish literature and the changing literary fashions of Vienna. No one from the outside could steer a direct course amid this confused and confusing situation. The language in the two sections might be identical but the overtones and the connotations would be very different, for even the presence of a few leaders from Great Ukraine in Galicia had not yet spun together all the threads that had been torn apart so completely centuries before. The man who was to found this literature and do more than his share in bringing together the two Ukraines was Ivan Franko, who is undoubtedly after Shevchenko the outstanding Ukrainian author. It is hardly necessary to point out the differences between them. Shevchenko was a natural genius. Franko was far from that and in his works, talented and excellent as they are, there is not that supreme perfection, that incomparable greatness that there was in the older man. Their lives too are markedly different in every way. Shevchenko, the self-educated son of a serf, was born in the period when the Romantic movement was at its height. He was old enough to have thrilled in his youth to the tales of the men who had taken part in the last armed revolts of the Ukrainians and his mind often harped back to the heroic days of the past. There was something romantic and tragic in his life story. His liberation from serfdom, his service in the Russian army, his association with many of the broadminded aristocrats of his day, all lend themselves to the dramatic and the unusual. There was none of this in Franko. He was more than well educated and his life is singularly empty of startling episodes. It is a prosaic record of duty recognized and executed, of articles written, of difficulties surmounted. If he ever had visions of riding into battle beside the great hetmans of the past, he did not bring himself to describe them. He offers us merely the commonplace spectacle of a hardworking journalist and editor winning his way by the sweat of his brow and the burning of the midnight oil. It was his task to remake the moral fibre of his people, to rebuild a shattered edifice and to expend superhuman energy in the process. All that does not lend itself to thrilling and unusual episodes but it is none the less valuable both for the man and his people. It is none the less important because it is not decked out with gaudy colors and with feats of physical daring and spectacular sufferings and endurance.