These characteristics are most clearly seen in his last collection published just about the time of his death and especially in the _Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors_, a story of peasant life in the Beskid Mountains which he visited in 1911. It is the account of the life of the shepherd boy Ivan Paliychuk. We see the young boy under the shadow of the family feud with the Gutenyuk family in which his father is killed, and his love for young Marichka of the rival clan. There is a really idyllic picture of the young love of these two children of nature, but Ivan is compelled by poverty to take a position as herdsman for the summer in the mountains and during that summer Marichka is drowned. Later he marries the wealthy Palagna and all seems to prosper but there is not that affection and sincerity between them that had existed between the young Ivan and his first love. His wife misbehaves shamefully with the sorcerer Yura and the two plan to kill Ivan by magic but he, broken hearted and in despair, wanders off into the woods and mountains, lured on by a spirit, a Nyavka that took the form of his beloved Marichka. Finally he fell over a precipice and was killed. Then came the funeral rites, the entertainments and the games that were customary while all through the neighborhood resounded the death strains of the Hutsul pipes. How far at this moment Kotsyubinsky is from the cold realism of the earlier authors can be seen from the way in which he enters into the realm of the peasant superstitions and makes plausible the appearance to Ivan in his despair of all those supernatural beings, the Nyavka and the Chugaystyr. He carries his readers into the spirit of the mountains not in any cold archaeological sense but as a living world apart from the ordinary affairs of men. If this was the culmination of the work of Kotsyubinsky, he had covered a long path in his creative development. He had started with little sketches and it was only in the pictures of the south in _Under the Minarets_ and _In the Paths of the Devil_ that he had begun to work out this finely chiseled style, the success of which depends so much upon his ability to evoke the beauty and the artistry of untutored nature.