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This webpage reproduces the main text of Ivan Franko by Clarence Manning Ukrainian University Society New York, 1937 The text is in the public domain. This text has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know!

 (p7) 

 p9  If Taras Shevchenko is the dominant literary figure in Ukraine during the first half of the nineteenth century, there can be no doubt that Ivan Franko held the leading position in the second half of the same century and in the period preceding the Great War. He was not as great a poet as was his predecessor but his contributions to the general literary development of his people and his work in all fields of social and economic endeavor assure him an outstanding place in the history of Ukrainian literature and in the political and moral movements of the day.

Shevchenko was a native of Great Ukraine. He was born within the Russian Empire and his life was connected with the great literary movements of the day and empire. He was born and brought up at a time when the memories of the old Sitch were still strong in the minds of the people. He matured during the period when the romantic movement was at its height and when poets of every land were dreaming of the great adventures of their ancestors on the field of battle. His Haydamaki, perhaps the greatest of his works, sang the praises of the Kozaks in their last desperate struggle against the Polish over­lords of the land and if it ended with a note of sadness, it at least brought home to the minds of his hearers the fact that the downfall of Poland as a state  p10 was directly connected with the last struggle of the Kozaks.

Franko commenced to write about half century later. He was born in a different environment. He was born in a different country, for he came from Western Ukraine, the province of Galicia now under Poland, but at that time within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. At the end of the nineteenth century, the dream of military revolt had faded. It appeared to all the world as if the European order had reached a new period of stabilization and only impractical dreamers and incorrigible optimists even dared to hope that there would come another period when national boundaries would be subjected to a fresh reconsideration and when opportunities would be at hand for those who were ready and prepared to seize them. The wiser and the more practical leaders were then forced to turn their attention not to dreams of national struggle but to the amelioration of the conditions of the people. Questions of education and of economic and social improvement were then in the forefront of the activities of the patriots. The old alluring problems were forced into the background. The days when there were picturesque and alluring events seemed over and the time had come for steady and unattractive but none the less vital and dangerous work.

There was another difference also between the two men and this was dependent upon their political nationality. The Ukrainian revival started within the Russian Empire. Here was the seat of the old Sitch. Here were gathered the traditions of the past. The religion of the country was predominantly Orthodox, as it had been for nearly a millennium. Across the borders in Western Ukraine, the people still called themselves by the ancient  p11 name of Ruthenians or Rusins. In religion, after the Union of Brest in 1596, they had become Uniate or Roman Catholics of the Greek Rite or Greek Catholics. They had accepted the Papal Supremacy but they maintained the language and customs of the Orthodox Christians. As a result they felt themselves separated from their brothers across the Russian frontier and they were not close to the groups living within the Kingdom of Hungary in what is now the Czechoslovak province of Podkarpatska Rus. The people of Western Ukraine were dimly conscious of the progress of the movement in Russia. They felt little direct sympathy and understanding for it and before there could be created a strong national feeling between the various dismembered fractions of the Ukrainian lands, there was needed long and hard work, a long process of explanation and of education. This was started in Kiev by the great scholar Drahomaniw. His works met with great opposition in Austria-Hungary and it was Franko who had much to do with the final unification of the desires and aspirations of the Ukrainians wherever they might be situated.

Thus whether we look at Franko from the political significance of his work or from the social and economic policies which he advocated, we find that he was a natural and outstanding leader. As might be inferred from the above, he was a radical and this undoubtedly annoyed certain groups, but his radicalism was based entirely upon his realization of the fact that events had passed beyond the theories of the past and that it was necessary to create a new theory on which life could be carried on. His role in literature was the same. He tried his hand at nearly every form of writing. He wrote lyrics, novels, plays,  p12 rarely epics, for the period was not friendly to that form of writing. He was the outstanding journalist of the Ukrainians; he was their foremost literary critic. In all these branches he set a standard of high excellence which those who came after would need to work hard to surpass.

This very change of period and of circumstances emphasized from the first the difference between Shevchenko and Franko. Shevchenko was born a serf and acquired freedom only on reaching manhood. Later still after a few brief years, he was arrested and forced to serve as a private in the Russian army. He was forbidden to write or draw and was forced to spend his time in a desolate army post near the Sea of Aral in Western Asia, from which he was released only a short time before his death.

* * *

Franko's life offers little or nothing that is picturesque or unusual. He was not of a wealthy family nor did he come of the humblest stock. He was born in the village of Nahuyevichi in Galicia on August 15, 1856. The family had been originally of German origin, although it was thoroughly Ukrainianized. His parents were able to give him opportunities for study in the local schools and in the neighboring towns, so that in 1875 he was prepared to enter the University of Lviw, which was then the highest center of education open to the Ukrainians in the Ukrainian language. He knew well not only his native tongue but also Polish and German, so that he was prepared to profit by any opportunities that might be offered to him.

 p13  In the University he plunged at once into the various conflicts that were taking place between the various Ukrainian or Ruthenian parties. These concerned the position of the people within the complicated framework of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and their relations to Russia and to various reforming movements. Franko very soon came to realize that these conflicts, fierce and bitter as they often were, did not go to the bottom of the Ukrainian question. He early came under the influence of Drahomaniw and felt the necessity of effecting a union, at least spiritually, between the two great branches of the Ukrainian race. He also became interested in the development of the socialist movements in Austria-Hungary and played an important part in their development. This brought him into close touch with some of the Polish groups in the province of Galicia and he worked with them for some years in the common cause of improving conditions in the province. For a while, even in his University days, he served as a correspondent for many of the German and Polish news­papers as well as editor of several Ukrainian publications.

As a result of his activities, he was arrested for the first time in July, 1877, and was imprisoned for nine months for his work on various student publications. He was shortly after his release re­arrested and again in 1889 he was put in prison for the third time, but these later arrests were shorter in duration and none of them broke his spirit or his desire to devote himself to popular service and enlightenment and he never wavered from the course which he mapped out for himself.

On the whole his life was un­event­ful. He paid two visits to Kiev in 1885 and 1886 and on the second of these he married. He studied for a  p14 while at the University of Vienna and in 1894 he received from that institution the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and for a while he had hopes of becoming Professor of Ukrainian at the University of Lviw but the authorities refused to confirm the appointment. He dabbled somewhat in Galician politics and in 1898 he sought election to the Austro-Hungarian Diet in Vienna. He was not success­ful because of the corruption of the elections and this led him in future to avoid politics in the narrower sense of the word, but it did not injure his popularity, as was seen at the celebrations arranged in his honor in 1898 on the completion of twenty five years of literary work and again in 1913 on the completion of forty years of endeavor.

His activity was enormous but it was rather the activity of a success­ful provincial journalist. For many years, as we have seen, he was the correspondent of the leading papers. He engaged in one form of journalistic activity after another. His articles on the literary, social and economic developments in Galicia enjoyed great authority and he was recognized as the intellectual leader of his people.

In 1890 he was one of the founders of the Galician Socialist Party and was the author of its original manifesto, although he was unable to secure the consent of the Poles to speak of the Polish and Ukrainian (or Ruthenian) socialists of Galicia. Later on his fundamental feud with the Poles led him to speak of Mickiewicz as the Poet of Treason in connection with the poem of Konrad Wallenrod and he identified most Polish activities with those of Konrad. This infuriated the Poles and Franko lost in a short time all of his assignments as correspondent for Polish papers in the province.

 p15  So passed the years. In 1908 he became seriously ill but illness did not prevent his working. The World War was a more severe blow. At the age of fifty-eight, he was introduced to the ravages of war. The Russians occupied Lviw and penetrated Galicia. Then they were forced to retreat. It was a sad time for Franko. His family had grown up and scattered. His sons were taken into the army. Living conditions were bad and there was the steadily increasing pressure from the censor­ship and the war-organized communities within the Empire. It was soon evident that Franko could not survive but he worked on with steadily failing health until his death on May 28, 1916. His funeral was arranged by the Literary Society of Shevchenko and the enormous crowds which gathered for it showed their appreciation and understanding of what he had done during his lifetime for all classes of the Ukrainian population.

* * *

Such were the facts of a life which was given over to the service of his own people. It is unromantic and really prosaic as we look at the external events but it was filled with an unflinching disregard for personal comfort and was motivated by a stern desire to be of use. Franko in a brief prelude to his Galician Sketches outlines his position:

In this passage Franko sets out the ideology that sustained him in his work. It is the typical practical attitude of the end of the nineteenth century, of a period when hard and unromantic work is seen to be the substitute for the impassioned oratory and the fervid aspirations that marked an earlier day. It locates the poet definitely as of a certain period when the ideals of human brotherhood were charting a course of slow development and when the goals that were to be achieved were definitely recognized as far in the future. Gone is the hope and the belief that one battle, one revolt, one moment of intense struggle will bring in a new day and the leaders were girding  p18 themselves for a long, slow process of education and of enlightenment.

This very passage shows us the type of poetry that Franko would write. From his earliest days we find him dedicated to the task of singing his own sufferings and those of his people and at the time he is always intensely proud of the power of the human spirit to overcome all obstacles. This was the keynote of his work from the prelude to his first great collection of poems. From the Heights and the Depths, when he sang

This theme runs through all of his earlier work and his collections, Proletarian Thoughts, Galician Sketches etc. The personal note comes out even more strongly in Prison Sonnets, which he composed during his third imprisonment and which form a diary of the moods which he underwent during the weeks of confinement. There is nothing in them to compare with the lyric and melodic beauty of the works of Shevchenko but like the earlier poet, Franko is deeply moved by the sufferings of his people and at the same time there is evident a latent confidence that there is a very practical way of helping them, if they can only be induced to listen and to follow.

In general during this period, the individual poems are rather short. They are rather sketches of an incident, a feeling, a mood, than narrative poems in the fullest sense of the word. It is only in the Nobleman's Pranks that he the rights of a subject in  p19 a large way. Here he describes the ending of serfdom in Galicia, the abolition of forced labor, and he pictures the foolish rage of the Polish nobles who cannot and will not accept the new order, until a strong hand from outside forces them to do so. Pan Mihucki could not bring himself to recognize that his peasants possessed any rights that he was bound to respect and he was unwilling to do anything that would benefit them in any way. When the devoted priest endeavored to preach temperance on his estates and still more when he endeavored to teach the children at least the elements of reading and writing, the strong-willed lord ordered that he be sent out to hard labor along with the rest of the serfs. It was of no avail that this action was a violation of the rights of the parish priest and contrary to the orders of the civil authority. The lord carried out his intention and his personal attendants and overseers compelled the old man to work until he dropped. All this happened just as the new order of things was introduced. The lord then quarreled with the imperial commander, a German, who sympathized with the people and realized their needs. To the surprise of the Polish nobleman, he soon found himself in prison, where he had placed so many of his innocent victims. This was too much, and though he was released soon, his time was over. He went abroad and within a year, he died. His widow returned home but she was entirely within the power of the Jewish agent and very soon she disappeared. "And Moshko bought the village." With these significant words the poem ends.

In this work, we see two themes that were later to dominate the writings of Franko. One is the devotion of the priest, the man who seeks to accomplish something good for his people without  p20 counting the cost to himself. He pays the price with his own life and happiness. Yet he is really not appreciated or not appreciated fully, and he does not secure full satisfaction for himself, for he always realizes how much better work he should be able to do. The other theme appears more consistently in Franko's prose — the steadily growing impoverishment of the Polish lords whose estates are already so mortgaged that a relatively slight misfortune can cause them to be utterly ruined.

This second theme is one that is easily overlooked in real life. To all outward appearances life in Eastern Galicia was proceeding smoothly. To all outward appearances the entertainments were as brilliant, the social life as gay and irresponsible as in the past, but there was something radically different underneath. Throughout all Europe the great landed estates which were economically profitable when the lords were living on the produce of their estates, were not producing enough ready cash to satisfy the growing desires of the owners for things that could only be bought with money. Under such conditions there was only one way out and the tavern-keepers of Eastern Galicia who were collecting the small coins of the peasantry were at the same time securing mortgages and deeds to the property of the landlords. Both peasant and nobleman would have found it to their interests to unite on a new and definite basis but pride and tradition were in the way and nothing was done until both were involved in the same, hopeless ruin. It was only sincere reformers and wise thinkers like Franko who saw the future doom. Usually it was neglected as it was by Pan Mihucki, until it was too late.

Perhaps the greatest of the collections of Franko are his Withered Leaves. Here in the three  p21  sheaves, he gives us pictures of love which represent the pain of life and of disappointment and leads almost to a Buddhistic attitude of Nirvana, where being and not-being are merged in one absorption into a universal whole. The first sheaf really is a cry of pain; the second accepts pain and makes a cult of it; and in the third there is a liberation from pain but that liberation means also resignation and a feeling of non-feeling, which contrasts strangely with the usual mood of Franko. In fact, for it, he was criticized by some as a decadent, although he was able to answer such a charge without any difficulty. The fact remains, however, that in the nineties the blows which life administered to Franko made him sigh at times for some solution which would not be so sad and discouraging. These were passing moments and yet it may well be said that some of his finest poems reflect such moods.

We can well believe this, because the type of the lost leader is one that stirs deeply in his mind. We have seen it in the priest in the Nobleman's Pranks. Nothing that the peasants could do could in any way assist him. There is the same feeling in the Death of Cain. The old man, broken and aged, in his attempt to approach mankind after long years of wandering, is killed by a misapprehension by his great grandson Lamech, old and blind himself and aiming the bow more or less by chance at the advice of a little child. Cain, whatever his mission or his punishment, has lost confidence in himself.

The same is true of Moses, perhaps his greatest piece of work. It is the story of Moses and the children of Israel. Moses suffers and struggles for his people but he finally loses faith in himself and in his own power and curses Jehovah in a spirit  p22 of unbelief, so that he is prevented from entering the promised land. Yet in this as in the prelude, Franko is speaking of himself and thinking of his own position. By every fibre of his being, Franko as a son of a peasant, as a person of democratic and socialistic leanings, realized that it was his task to act as the representative of his race. Yet that very task involved moments and years when he had to turn against the false leaders who had the ears of the masses. It was his task then to compel those of whom he formed a part to listen to him as one within their group and still outside of it? This is the curse and the problem of every farsighted leader. He must be with the group and not too far ahead of it or too close to it. It is a difficult and a heartbreaking task, this union of socialist and individualist, and Franko in Moses and in others of his longer stories expresses this same problem in all of its different forms.

Much of his work was directed against the Polish lords of Galicia but his democratic and socialistic instincts urged him to protest against tyranny even when exercised by magistrates of his own people. This is the theme of his historical novel, Zakhar Berkut, a tale of the Carpathians. The villain, if we may so call him, is Prince Tuhar Vovk (Tuhar the Wolf) who enters the territory which has been assigned to him as his feudal domain by Prince Danilo of Halich, only to come into conflict with the native villagers who are headed by a ninety-year old peasant Zakhar Berkut. Berkut is a patriarch in the fullest sense of the word, and age has not dulled his mentality, although it has rendered him slower of action. Yet he has won by purely democratic means the love and affection of all the villagers. His character  p23 and his wisdom have helped them in many emergencies and they willingly believe his words. Now in opposition to the feudal lord, he advises the latter to submit himself willingly in the disputed matters to the village community, the old town-meeting of the peasants. Tuhar proudly refuses to discuss any of his rights with those whom he regards as inferiors. Later he deserts to the Tatars but even then his treachery brings him no profit, for the skill and intelligence and knowledge of Berkut and his friends are able to flood the path over which Tuhar and his allies must pass to attack them and against the wall of water the invaders beat in vain. There is the typical romantic interest in the novel in the love of Tuhar's daughter for the son of Berkut but this is only incidental. Franko seeks to show the power and the strength of a peasant community, once it entrusts its fate to a wise leader, chosen and approved by itself, and under such conditions it possesses almost inexhaustible resources of courage and endurance. Power does not come from mere formulations and in the form of the old peasant leader Franko sets out his ideal of the type of man who can lead his people with success.

In others of his stories as the Crossed Paths, the scene is laid in Galicia of the author's day and Franko tries again to bring out the same lesson which he indicated in the Nobleman's Pranks. Here we have as the hero a young lawyer, Dr. Rafalovich, who desires to plead the cause of the peasants and insists upon doing his work in Ukrainian instead of seeking for more lucrative cases in Polish. Yet even he is surprised to discover how completely the land­owners are entangled with their mortgages and debts. They cannot continue to live as they are doing, whatever their pretensions to  p24 nobility and greatness. The way is easy for the peasants to organize and secure control of the land for themselves, but they do not have the confidence in one another or even the intellectual ability to unite and endeavor to secure the estate. They want it but they will not take the necessary steps to bring their dream into being. The romance of the story is sad. The girl whom Rafalovich had loved in Lviw as a student has been forced into a marriage with a thorough sadist named Stal'sky without abuses her in every way, is insanely jealous of her, and yet will not do anything to make life happy or even bearable for her. Rafalovich is arrested and later released to continue his work but something has gone out of him, some ambition destroyed and his hopes of happiness are definitely gone.

The theme of unhappy marriage played a considerable part in the writings of Franko and we can understand why. Under the customs of his day, in far too many cases marriages were arranged with little regard for the feelings of the individual, particularly the girl. This resulted in a form of unhappiness and of injustice that was repugnant to Franko and so we find his criticisms here moved by the same desire for the introduction of justice and intelligence among his people that we find in other fields of activity. Thus we see it in Stolen Happiness, his best play, which won second prize in a competition in Lviw. It is the hopeless love of a retired soldier who returned to his native village to find that the girl whom he loved had been compelled to marry another. Such events were probably relatively frequent and to Franko it was one of the darkest spots on the life of his people in a field where there was no  p25  possibility of laying the blame on the oppressors or on any one else.

Another novel that betrays also the cruelty of one Rusin to another is found in For the Home Hearth. The hero Captain Anharovich returns to Galicia from a post in Bosnia only to learn that his wife his become involved in the business of prostitution during his absence. When she is unmasked, she finally commits suicide and the case is quashed without affecting the honor or the career of the husband, although it has almost broken his heart and induced him to fight a duel with his best friend.

We must note that in this and the preceding work Franko makes his hero a soldier or an officer of the army. He makes no attempt to attack him. With all his desire for freedom, Franko saw the great foe of his people in the Polish land­owners of Galicia. He shows consistently the evils as they exist in the province and he unhesitatingly places his finger on the direct cause, the Polish supremacy. He does not emphasize the evils of Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian government as a whole. It is easy to say that this is the result of censor­ship and that Franko did not dare to touch such subjects. This is hardly true for he is unrelenting in his desires and willingness to tell the truth.

There is a deeper aspect to the problem and one that is easy to overlook. In the complicated structure of Austria-Hungary, it often happened that the central authority was definitely seeking to remedy local abuses. The German representatives as the commissioner in the Nobleman's Pranks who came from Vienna into Galicia realized more clearly than the peasants the sources of unhappiness  p26 and of evil. They realized the repellent hand of the local bureaucracies, the woes inflicted by the tavern keepers and they sought for some way to make conditions better and more equitable. Franko was honest enough to recognize that these men were not working against the interests of the peasants. If they had any prejudice, it would be against the powers in force in the various provinces and so in many a crisis the Rusin and the representative of Vienna would stand together against the local provincial magnates.

Franko was urging the improvement of his people but only in wild moments of dreaming did he visualize a definite political freedom for his people. Rather his pen touched those problems that would indicate a provincial improvement and conditions made it such that in most of his works he used the word Rusin, rather than Ukrainian, for that word was practically taboo in the old Empire. Even in 1914 it seemed impossible that the two great empires would crumble so quickly and for that reason his work lay in his opinion in the practical training of the Ukrainian population of Austria-Hungary for life within the empire. He realized the essential unity of the Ukrainians on both sides of the frontier; he cooperated actively with the great scholars and publicists in Great Ukraine but his practical work was largely confined to the population of Galicia. If only the people there were trained and educated, they could play a proper role in whatever crisis was to develop and that was all that a man in his position could hope to accomplish.

In all this work, Franko was always himself. The people recognized the greatness of his mind and of his knowledge and yet there were moments  p27  when he felt himself alone and forsaken as did Moses. Amid the difficult and ignorant villagers and the even more difficult and no less ignorant intelligentsia, Franko was often almost in despair but he never wavered in his work.

He ended his life as he began it, a man devoted to the cause of liberty and of freedom and of progress. He condemned somewhere and at sometime almost everything that was deserving of condemnation. His literary work ranges over the whole of Galician life from the time of the Berkuts in the early thirteenth century to the very beginning of the twentieth. It is a long range of interest but if we add to this the publicistic and journalistic works, we must marvel at the breadth of interest and of vision which he showed.

He died at about the age of sixty. Had he lived but a few months more, he would have seen that the impossible had become possible, for he would have seen the startling collapse of the old Empires and the new and more optimistic change in the Ukrainian situation. Then came the reaction and Franko can well be glad that he did not live to see the defeat inflicted still later upon the Ukrainian aspirations. He would have seen, however, had he lived, the correctness of his views that more progress and more hard work, the raising of the general level of culture and of efficiency were necessary and he would have driven himself harder in his field of work.

Ivan Franko is an author of whom the Ukrainians may well be proud. He is a man who deserves to be far better known abroad than he has been in the past. As a poet, as a citizen, as a critic, he stands out in that little group which worked to forge close and common bonds between all parts  p28 of Ukraine. He was inspired in his youth to do this and he continued the task to the end of his life. He did more than that, for he was a great character, a great leader and a man who merits whatever his people can find in the way of honor for him and for his work.

---

Thayer's Note:

a This is just the first of the three sonnets comprising Franko's poem. The Ukrainian original can be read at Бібліотека української літератури УкрЛіб.

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