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tion. In the seventeenth century, when she contracted a union with Moscovia, the Ukraine had fewer illiterates than she has now, after two and a half centuries of Russian domination. And it was in this same century that the Muscovites endeavoured to awake to the intellectual life, and it was to the Ukrainians, to the scholars of the Academy of Kiev, that they appealed for their education.
Centuries of oppression have hindered the progress of high culture in Ukraine, but this oppression has never abolished the efflorescence of the letters and sciences. If in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries writers used a conventional language written in a more or less archaic style, we see, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the litterateur employ the popular and living language of the Ukraine, that of the poetic song and the legendary ballads of the country.
The father of the new Ukrainian literature was a citizen of Poltava, of the name of Kotlarevsky. His dramatic play, "Natalka Poltavka," is still played on all the Ukrainian stages. His humorous and satiric adaptation of the "Enéide," in which he put in the place of Trojans the Cossacks dispersed by Catherine II, had a tremendous reception.
After Kotlarevsky, a pleiade of poets and writers succeeded, among which domniated a veritable genius: Shevchenko. The latter has written some admirable lyrical poems: he has made the tragic and glorious past live again, he has exalted the sentiment of the country. His influence on the national and foreign literature has been immense.
To-day the Ukrainian literature abounds in poets, novelists, and dramatists. Among the contemporary writers, one distinguishes the fine figure of Ivan Franko, author of the prophetical poem of "Moses," the delicate, æsthetic, and famous novelist, Kotzubinsky, the elegiac poet, Olès, and perhaps one of the most original and vivacious writers of the European East, Vinnichenko.
