Most writers who have employed the Little Russian dialect are difficult of comprehension not only to educated Great Russians, but also to ordinary Little Russians, because their language is artificial, intermingled with a mass of new words and expressions invented in educated circles of Little Russia.

But Shevtchenko wrote in the living tongue of the Ukraina, in which its people talk and sing.

His best work, after he came under the influence of Zhukovsky, is "The Hired Woman." This is the story of a girl who is betrayed, then forced by outsiders to abandon her child, after which she hires herself out as servant to the people at whose door she has left the child, and so is enabled to rear it, only revealing the secret to her child on her deathbed.
The sufferings of the people in serfdom form the subject of another series of his poems, and in this category, "Katerina" is the best worked out and most dramatic of his productions.

A third category comprises the historical ballads, in which he celebrates the days of kazak freedom.
This class comprises two long poems, "The Haidamak" (The Kazak Warrior of Ancient Ukraina) and "Gamaliya," besides a number of short rhapsodies.

In these poems the writer has expressed his political and social views, and they are particularly prized by his fellow-landsmen of the Ukraina.