One of his most striking stories is the _Dream_, and here we see one of the underlying ideas of our author. The scene is the prosaic life of an ordinary family. When they were young and first married, Antin and Marta had something to live for. They had love and affection but the dull routine of life had carried all that away and now they were living well but uninterestingly. There were the prosaic facts of daily life, the ordinary cares and petty household and office activities. Marta was unconscious of the loss. Antin was and in his dreams which he tells his wife, he resurrects the past and imagines a new romance with a girl in Italy. There is beauty, there is love, there is passion, and it is all a dream. At first the mere idea that her well-known husband could become a problem to her, that there were in his being elements that she had effectively stifled in herself was too much for her. Yet at the end it did rouse her to make an attempt to bring back something of that past, and “She did not know whether she would have the strength, whether storms would rage at some future time, but now oftener than before roses adorned their dining table.” It was the fault of routine. “She had not known to guard life, to preserve its beauty. Daily she had been throwing it away in trifles, in the useless filth of existence, until she had turned it into a foul pit. Poetry cannot live in such an atmosphere, and without it, life is a crime.” That is the real gist of the work of Kotsyubinsky. In his memoirs Gorky emphasizes this quality of the author and it takes precedence over all other aspects of his work. Life can be made interesting. Life can be made good. Sympathy and love and kindness can be universal and perhaps they are so natural to man that they can even pass over into the consciousness of dogs and other animals that are near to man. It is a law of life and he who neglects does so at his infinite peril. It is this spirit that moved and inspired all of his writings. It gave him the feeling and the desire to penetrate the human heart and mind to understand man as he really can be. Humanity, beauty, the people, Ukraine--these were the things for which Kotsyubinsky lived and about which he thought and wrote and dreamed. Between him and Levitsky and the older novelists there was a great gulf. They had been as eager to help the people as he was. They were as self-sacrificing as he was, but they did not try to take into account those other values which he regarded so highly.