Yet poetry was not his only mode of literary expression. He was a prolific writer of novels and short stories. All of these aimed to show forth by example the great truths which he felt in his poetry and which he expounded in his journalistic writings. Let us take for example _Zakhar Berkut_, a historical novel of the Ukrainian people in the Carpathian Mountains in the thirteenth century, which he wrote in 1882 and for which he received a prize offered by the journal _Zorya_. The Boyar Tuhar Vovk was given domains by Danilo the Prince of Halich. There he exercised certain rights and powers in opposition to the peasant tradition and he refused to submit them to adjudication before the council of the villagers under their chosen head, Zakhar Berkut, a peasant of some ninety years of age whose mind was still keen, even if his body was aging. All the efforts of the Boyar to assert himself against the wishes of the people came to naught. As one man they stood together and thwarted all his schemes. Even when the Boyar became a traitor to his people and allied himself with the Tatar invaders, it did no good, for the villagers were able to flood the path over which the attackers had to move. The love affair between Berkut’s son and the daughter of the Boyar is rather colorless and stereotyped. The novel reads well and even the editors who awarded him the prize did not grasp the obvious moral that the people would be invincible, if they would but unite under a rational and sane leadership to defend their rights. Power and legality cannot come from mere words. They rest upon concerted action and that is the one thing that the villagers of his day did not wish to see.