Thus Lesya Ukrainka used her very isolation from the world and the fact that she was obliged to live in a literary atmosphere with books as her chief friends to increase her power to write a Ukrainian literature in a modern and more cosmopolitan style. She was typical of the newer intelligentsia who were none the less patriotic, none the less zealous for Ukraine, because they were able to present its case in forms that were being developed abroad. In a sense her work marked the end of that old ethnographical-political period which had been so necessary in the first stages of arousing the people to a consciousness of their past. She assumed that that had been achieved, and on that basis she started for the younger generation a new literature which was to adapt the general ideas of modern Europe to Ukraine and to bring the intelligentsia into a new world. Surrounded by those friends whom she knew and liked and isolated from the worst storms of the day, she often felt the oppression of loneliness and solitude. She could not hope for wide popularity and it is probably not too much to say that the wider circles of Ukrainian society began to appreciate her only after her untimely death. Since then there has been a steadily widening circle of her admirers who have recognized in her one of the great masters of the Ukrainian language. Her native talent and her industry made her works masterpieces. She won many imitators for the new style of writing. The universality of her themes and the careful treatment that she gave to various human emotions have made her more than the poet of a passing era and she is one of those authors who gain a steadily increasing number of readers and admirers as time passes. Yet with it all her desire for the cosmopolitan never led her away from her native land and in her Ukraine found a devoted patriot and a great understanding soul. CHAPTER TWELVE MIKHAYLO KOTSYUBINSKY