The style is still only partially developed in such tales as _At a Great Price_ published in 1902. It might easily be a historical novel for it refers back to those days when the persecuted and oppressed Ukrainians were seeking to escape into Turkey in the hopes of founding there a new Sich after their own had been destroyed. Ostap starts on the difficult journey and his wife, the devoted Solomeya, overtakes him and goes with him and shares his hardships. They try once to cross the border but the Cossack guards intercept them. A little later Ostap is badly wounded in another attempt and is nursed back to life by the care of his wife. They are helped and plundered by the Gypsies and finally Ostap is rescued by his wife and a friend from the hands of the Turks, but she is drowned in the Danube in the attempt. So he lives alone, and he shows his bare back to those who will listen and look at the marks left by the cruel floggings which he had received in his lifetime. “Here on my back is a memory from my master, and in front between my ribs is my present from the Moskal. Well placed ... with them I will go to God.... I paid well for my liberty, I paid a bitter price. Half of me lies at the bottom of the Danube and the other is waiting and cannot wait to join it.” Here is the germ of the later development with its appreciation of nature and of the undying call of liberty and democracy. Kotsyubinsky was keenly aware of the wave of unrest that was sweeping Ukraine along with the rest of Russia just prior to the Revolution of 1905 and in the _Fata Morgana_, he gives us the first rumblings of the coming storm in the picture of the poor peasant Andriy and his wife Malanka and his daughter Hafiyka. The father has long since given up the struggle to become independent. His wife has married him for want of a better suitor and they have one daughter, beautiful as a picture but still with no dowry and faced with the possibility of a joyless life. The father dreams that a factory may be built, so that there can be work. The mother still has the unsatisfied craving of the Ukrainian peasant for the land. She muses “How splendid thou art, O earth. It is pleasant to sow thee with grain, to adorn thee with green, to decorate thee with flowers. It is pleasant to work thee. Only thou are not good in this, that thou art not kind to the poor man. For the rich thou glowest with beauty, the rich thou pleasest, thou clothest him, and the poor man thou receivest only in a grave.... But our hands are waiting to work our meadows, our cities, our gardens.... They will divide thee, O land, and ‘our benefactor’ will come to the plough. Oh, God, God, even in my old age grant me this happiness to bring out my child among people.” Into this environment come the first students who are arrested by the police, the first outbursts of hostility against the established order. Kotsyubinsky had planned a trilogy on this theme but he only