How I love you. What are the bloodless chronicles I pore over beside
those clear, live chronicles! I cannot live without songs; they . . .
reveal everything more and more clearly, oh, how clearly, gone-by life
and gone-by men. . . . The songs of Little Russia are her everything,
her poetry, her history, and her ancestral grave. He who has not
penetrated them deeply knows nothing of the past of this blooming
region of Russia."

Indeed, so great was his enthusiasm for his own land that after
collecting material for many years, the year 1833 finds him at work on
a history of "poor Ukraine," a work planned to take up six volumes;
and writing to a friend at this time he promises to say much in it
that has not been said before him. Furthermore, he intended to follow
this work with a universal history in eight volumes with a view to
establishing, as far as may be gathered, Little Russia and the world
in proper relation, connecting the two; a quixotic task, surely. A
poet, passionate, religious, loving the heroic, we find him constantly
impatient and fuming at the lifeless chronicles, which leave him cold
as he seeks in vain for what he cannot find. "Nowhere," he writes in
1834, "can I find anything of the time which ought to be richer than
any other in events. Here was a people whose whole existence was
passed in activity, and which, even if nature had made it inactive,
was compelled to go forward to great affairs and deeds because of its
neighbours, its geographic situation, the constant danger to its
existence. . . . If the Crimeans and the Turks had had a literature I
am convinced that no history of an independent nation in Europe would
prove so interesting as that of the Cossacks." Again he complains of
the "withered chronicles"; it is only the wealth of his country's song
that encourages him to go on with its history.