Like them in style he was realistic and naturalistic. He endeavored to deal with life as it was in the rough and the unmild as in the _Intermezzo_, where life among human beings is like that among the wolves for the people ruined by syphilis, poverty, alcohol, and illiteracy, know nothing better than to fight and destroy one another, but there was something more, for he wished not only to tell a story to impress the minds and hearts of his readers, but he wanted also to evoke a mood so as to stir their emotions and to rouse their sense of beauty. Beauty and harmony appear in all the later works of Kotsyubinsky. It is a deliberate beauty and a deliberate harmony, not like that natural spark of the genius Shevchenko who seemed from the very beginning to know what to say and how to say it. With Kotsyubinsky it was something acquired. The feeling was natural to him. He had that finely balanced character that was favorable to its growth but there was a conscious training of that feeling. It is small wonder that Kotsyubinsky was not a voluminous writer. It was impossible to imagine him combining literature and journalism or entering the rough and tumble arena of life. It is impossible to picture him careless or indifferent. The very methods that he borrowed from impressionism and grafted on to his realistic settings are those which are the results of a real understanding of the finer points of culture. Without poetry, life is a crime. It is a new note in Ukrainian literature, a note of a growing maturity, a greater refinement, a sign that Ukrainian literature is taking its place as one of the culture literatures of the world. The problems of Ukraine are still as pressing, they have not been solved but Kotsyubinsky feels that it is no use to harp only on the external and the immediate. The Ukrainians still have souls and if they are to be really civilized people, they must share the emotions and the sensations of civilized people. They must deepen their life as well as broaden it. From his earliest efforts Kotsyubinsky steadily deepened and broadened his range of subjects. He did for prose what Lesya Ukrainka and others had done for poetry and when he died in 1913, he could look at the world and say, as he had always thought, that life was good, that mankind had enormous potentialities, and that he had done his part in making them available and accessible for literature. CHAPTER THIRTEEN VASIL STEFANYK