The phenomenon was not confined to the Slavonic countries. We can trace it in English and American literature, in the almost unconscious efforts of the more modern writers to turn away from the picturing of virtuous peasants and farmers and to see in the country characters who possess all possible vices and perversions. The old view that the city is the source of corruption and decay and the rural districts are the home of virtue is looked upon as old-fashioned and the newer psychology endeavors to analyze, to explain or at least to picture almost photographically the warped and helpless types that are found everywhere. The same movement made its appearance in Ukrainian and the great master of this school was Vasil Stefanyk, a consummate artist and a miniaturist in words. His pictures are short and concise. In a few phrases and a few paragraphs he pictures the sad state of the average Galician village and the strange creatures that inhabit it. He had a good opportunity to study these people for he lived almost his whole life among them. He got to know the inner life of the village, the sorrows and the scanty joys of the people of a community where prosperity rarely occurs and where misery and disease are universal. Vasil Stefanyk was born in 1871 in Western Ukraine in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. He received a good education at Krakow and for a while studied medicine but he left the university without completing his course. In the meantime he had become friendly with some of the leaders of the Young Poland movement and shared with them their infatuation for the life of the common people. Wyspianski and the others of the group were actuated by a new interest in the life of the ordinary Polish peasant and were trying to understand the psychology of the average villager. Stefanyk applied the same technique to the life of his own people. As a result he went back to his own village and settled down as a farmer among them. He got to know them and their modes of thought and expression. He studied their local and untutored dialect, he learned to appreciate the difficulties with which they were confronted and he began those stories of peasant existence that have made him one of the greatest prose artists of modern Ukrainian literature.