Kotsyubinsky started to write in the same ethnographic realistic style that had been popularized by Levitsky-Nechuy. He had been inspired to write in Ukrainian by the _Kobzar_ of Shevchenko and the stories of Marko Vovchok but he very soon broadened his literary range by the diligent reading of later Russian authors such as Chekhov and also by the careful study of the French and Scandinavian naturalists as Zola, Maupassant, and Hamsun. All of these affected his style in passing but he gradually worked out his own attitude toward literature and developed that individual style in which his main works were written. As he developed, he came more and more to understand the importance of beauty in writing. He realized that there was always one correct word artistically for every situation and he made great efforts to find that right word, so as to secure the maximum effectiveness of his work. He had a lyric and almost a sentimental appreciation of nature and his power of casting a roseate glow over a scene and giving a poetic picture in a few simple words of prose is marked. Perhaps of his contemporaries only Korolenko shares that power and he too was of Ukrainian origin, although he wrote in Russian. The ability to transfigure an unpleasant and sordid scene and make of it a thing of beauty without preventing the reader from realizing its real character is a marked feature of Kotsyubinsky’s style. It definitely advances him above the level of the great majority of the Ukrainian authors and makes him a European writer in the best sense. Side by side with this is a delicate appreciation of human psychology. In his short stories with a remarkable economy in means, he is able to penetrate the human heart and to express the most poignant feelings and the most secret ambitions of a man or woman.