During the greater part of the nineteenth century it was the task of the Ukrainian authors to arouse and educate their people. The nation in its darkest hour had lost to Russia or to Poland practically the whole of its educated class and the national habits and characteristics were preserved in the villages among the illiterate peasants. The first and most pressing duty was to form a new educated class, to give a knowledge of the past of Ukraine to those people who were but dimly conscious of their existence as a separate entity and to lay the foundation for a deeper study of their own traditions and habits. At the same time the harsh censorship and the regulations, especially of the Russian government, practically required that this work be carried on under the guise of the study of ethnography and archaeology. The very names of the journals that appeared in Russia as _Bulletin of the Archaeological Commission_ and the _Kievskaya Starina_, (_Antiquities of Kiev_) the only ones that were allowed to appear during the periods of repression show the truth of this statement and it was only natural accordingly that the writers who were compelled to work with one eye on the censorship tended to exploit these possibilities. There grew up in Ukrainian literature a definite ethnographic school and the writers with pleasure and profit gave long descriptions of the manners and customs of the villagers. The time, however, had to come, when the authors would no longer be content with these self-imposed limitations and would branch out into a broader field. The author who was to do this in prose was Mikhaylo Kotsyubinsky, one of the greatest artists in this field. Kotsyubinsky was born at Vinnitsa in Podolia in 1864. His father was a poor official but during his father’s lifetime he was able to study in the bursa and the theological academy. He did not finish the course and after his father’s death he made his living for a while as a private tutor. He continued his own studies especially of literature and finally entered the government service. In the early nineties he was attached to the commission for the elimination of the phyloxera which was ruining the vineyards in the south and he passed several years in Bessarabia and the Crimea, where he had extensive opportunities to study the lives of the villagers. He then served in the statistical office in Chernihiv. During this time the Revolution of 1905 broke out and Kotsyubinsky became very friendly with Maxim Gorky and many of the leaders of the Social Democratic party of Russia. He finally retired on a pension in 1911 to devote himself entirely to literature. He went to Italy and lived near Gorky on the island of Capri. His heart grew steadily worse and he returned to Kiev for a long period of treatment but it did no good and he passed away in 1913 at the age of forty-nine.