The author reveals the depressing feelings of the emigrant at the moment of his break with his native village and a piece of land, in the cultivation of which he invested all his life and must leave.

"The Stone Cross," in this case, is a study of the soul of a Ukrainian peasant worker, whose social circumstances force him to break the age-old connection with the soil where he grew up.

The former mercenary Ivan Didukh, who had served 10 years in the imperial army, returned home and found only a dilapidated house and the worst part of the field on a barren sandhill, inherited from his dead parents.

He denied himself everything he needed, went to church only on Easter, had lunch in a hurry, without even sitting at the table; trained chickens who did not dare to rake the manure because every small thing was destined for the hump, every minute of time was given to work.

With stingy strokes, the author conveys the longing that tears the soul of the sаe hero: "He gritted his teeth like a millstone, threatened the woman with his fist like a bullet and beat in the chest."

In the third chapter, Ivan explains to people the reasons for his decision to leave, about how difficult it was for him because hard work has completely exhausted him, he does not have the strength to start a new life overseas.

Ivan appreciates the support, but he cannot accept this situation calmly; when he has to leave the world in his old age from his native place, he is frightened by an unknown life, which for him is like death.

In the fourth chapter, Ivan addressed his fellow villagers with a request that as soon as the news of his death with his wife arrives, they should hold a memorial service for the repose of their souls and left the money to decent Jacob.

Ivan admitted that in a moment of despair and inability to come to terms with the new trials of fate, he almost had committed suicide, going to hang himself on a pear, but remembered the hump, had run to his cross, where he resigned himself to the decision to go overseas.

All of Ivan's thoughts are concentrated around the hill: he asked the neighbors not to pass him on Easter, to send one of the young people to sprinkle the cross with holy water.

"The words of those songs are going, like yellow autumn leaves, which the wind drives across the frozen ground, and it stops again and again on each fair and trembles with torn shores, as before death."

"[1] To embody his idea, the novelist resorts to a kind of plot-compositional organization of the text, at the same time operating with the poetics of expressionism, which is manifested in the artistic study of the meaning of suffering that motivates a man to know the essence of his existence; in the emotional sharpness of the portrayed, fragmentary, "nervous" dynamic-expressive phrase, intense drama of the situation.

The lyrical flow that sounds in the farewell monologues of the hero, "the man's way of conversation is transferred alive," "excavations" in the confused human soul, pain, unfortunately, mental suffering determine the mood of the novel.

Due to the narrower, concrete-historical problem of emigration, the author reveals in the work a much broader, eternal question of the sacred connection of man with his native land.

An important role is given to artistic details that motivate the reader in his imagination to complete the image, often have a deep symbolic meaning, and carry super textual information.

Monologues, which are an important means of his individualization, revolve primarily around the image of the hill on which Ivan Didukh erected a stone cross in memory of the village with embossed names - his and his wife.

The image of the cross symbolizes the miserable fate of a peasant who worked hard all his life and was equally forced to leave his field because it was unable to feed him.

Describing the life story of the rural poor Ivan Didukh, who, as a result of all his superhuman efforts, was landless, the writer reflects the moral factors that create the spiritual essence of man, and above all - on the problem of connection with the native land.

The creators of the expressionist style revived the ancient truth that "you can't even pluck a flower without disturbing the stars," that the whole Universe is an inseparable whole.

The reasons that led to the mass resettlement were the search for a better fate for the desperate peasants, who, despite their hard work, lost all hope of a dignified life in their country.