Ivan Franko
Ivan Yakovych Franko PhD was a Ukrainian poet, writer, social and literary critic, journalist, translator, economist, political activist, ethnographer, and the author of the first detective novels and modern poetry in Ukrainian.
Franko was a political radical, and a founder of the socialist and nationalist movement in Western Ukraine. In addition to his own literary work, he also translated into Ukrainian the works of such renowned figures as William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Dante Alighieri, Victor Hugo, Adam Mickiewicz, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. His translations appeared on the stage of the Ruska Besida Theatre. Along with Taras Shevchenko, he has had a tremendous influence on modern literary and political thought in Ukraine.
Biography
Early years
Franko was born in the Ukrainian village of Nahuievychi, then located in the Austrian kronland of Galicia, today part of Drohobych Raion, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine. As a child, he was baptized as Ivan by Father Yosyp Levytsky, known as a poet and the author of the first Galician-Ruthenian , who was later exiled to Nahuievychi for a "sharp tongue". At home, however, Ivan was called Myron because of a local superstitious belief that naming a person by a different name will dodge death. Franko's family in Nahuievychi was considered "well-to-do", with their own servants and of owned property.Franko's family possibly had German origins, being descendants of German colonists. Ivan Franko believed it to be true. That statement is also supported by Timothy Snyder who describes Yakiv Franko as a village blacksmith of German Roman Catholic descent. For certain the Franko family was already living in Galicia when the country was incorporated into Austria in 1772. Ivan Franko's great-grandfather Teodor Franko baptized his children in the Greek Catholic church.
Franko's mother Maria came from a family of petty nobility. The Kulczyckis were an ancient noble family hailing from the village of Kulchytsi in the Sambir Raion. Her mother was Ludwika Kulczycka, a widow with six children from. Researchers describe Franko's mother's nationality as Polish or Ukrainian. The petty gentry in Eastern Galicia often retained elements of Polish culture and fostered a sense of solidarity with the Polish nobility, but they also Ruthenized and blended in with the surrounding peasantry. For example, Franko's uncle Ivan Kulczycki took part in the Polish uprising of 1863. Franko's distant relative, his aunt Koszycka, with whom he lived while studying in Drohobych, spoke Polish and Ruthenian.
Ivan Franko attended school in the village Yasenytsia Sylna from 1862 until 1864, and from there attended the Basilian monastic school in Drohobych until 1867. His father died before Ivan was able to graduate from the gymnasium, but his stepfather supported Ivan in continuing his education. Soon, however, Franko found himself completely without parents after his mother died as well and later the young Ivan stayed with totally unrelated people. In 1875, he graduated from the Drohobych Realschule, and continued on to Lviv University, where he studied classical philosophy, Ukrainian language and literature. It was at this university that Franko began his literary career, with various works of poetry and his novel Petriï i Dovbushchuky published by the students' magazine Druh, whose editorial board he would later join.
Socialist activism and imprisonment
A meeting with Mykhailo Drahomanov at Lviv University made a huge impression on Ivan Franko. It later developed into a long political and literary association. Franko's own socialist writings and his association with Drahomanov led to his arrest in 1877, along with Mykhailo Pavlyk and Ostap Terletsky, among others. They were accused of belonging to a secret socialist organization, which did not in fact exist. However, the nine months in prison did not discourage his political writing or activities. In prison, Franko wrote the satire Smorhonska Akademiya. After release, he studied the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, contributed articles to the Polish newspaper Praca and helped organize workers' groups in Lviv. In 1878 Franko and Pavlyk founded the magazine Hromads'kyi Druh. Only two issues were published before it was banned by the government; however, the journal was reborn under the names Dzvin and Molot. Franko published a series of books called Dribna Biblioteka from 1878 until his second arrest for arousing the peasants to civil disobedience in 1880. After three months in the Kolomyia prison, the writer returned to Lviv. His impressions of this exile are reflected in his novel Na Dni. Upon his release, Franko was kept under police surveillance. At odds with the administration, Franko was expelled from Lviv University, an institution that would be renamed Ivan Franko National University of Lviv after the writer's death.Franko was an active contributor to the journal Svit in 1881. He wrote more than half of the material, excluding the unsigned editorials. Later that year, Franko moved to his native Nahuievychi, where he wrote the novel Zakhar Berkut, translated Goethe's Faust and Heine's poem Deutschland: ein Wintermärchen into Ukrainian. He also wrote a series of articles on Taras Shevchenko, and reviewed the collection Khutorna Poeziya by Panteleimon Kulish. Franko worked for the journal Zorya, and became a member of the editing board of the newspaper Dilo a year later.
Marriage and engagement in politics
Franko married Olha Khoruzhynska from Kyiv in May 1886, to whom he dedicated the collection Z vershyn i nyzyn, a book of poetry and verse. The couple lived in Vienna for some time, where Ivan Franko met with Theodor Herzl and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. His wife was to later suffer from a debilitating mental illness due to the death of the first-born son, Andriy, one of the reasons that Franko would not leave Lviv for treatment in Kyiv in 1916, shortly before his death.In 1888, Franko was a contributor to the journal Pravda, which, along with his association with compatriots from Dnieper Ukraine, led to a third arrest in 1889. After this two-month prison term, he co-founded the Ruthenian-Ukrainian Radical Party with Mykhailo Drahomanov and Mykhailo Pavlyk. Franko was the Radical party's candidate for seats in the parliament of Austria and the Galicia Diet, but never won an election.
In 1891, Franko attended the Franz-Josephs-Universität Czernowitz, and then attended the University of Vienna to defend a doctoral dissertation on the spiritual romance Barlaam and Josaphat under the supervision of Vatroslav Jagić, who was considered the foremost expert of Slavic languages at the time. Franko received his doctorate of philosophy from University of Vienna on July 1, 1893. He was appointed lecturer in the history of Ukrainian literature at Lviv University in 1894; however, he was not able to chair the Department of Ukrainian literature there because of opposition from Vicegerent Kazimierz Badeni and Galician conservative circles.
File:Учасники з’їзду українських письменників з нагоди 100-річчя виходу в світ «Енеїди».jpeg|thumb|The board and members of the Shevchenko Scientific Society celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ivan Kotliarevsky's Eneida, Lviv, 31 October 1898: Sitting in the first row: Mykhaylo Pavlyk, Yevheniya Yaroshynska, Natalia Kobrynska, Olha Kobylianska, Sylvester Lepky, Andriy Chaykovsky, Kost Pankivsky. In the second row: Ivan Kopach, Volodymyr Hnatiuk, Osyp Makovej, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Ivan Franko, Oleksandr Kolessa, Bohdan Lepky. Standing in the third row: Ivan Petrushevych, Filaret Kolessa, Yossyp Kyshakevych, Ivan Trush, Denys Lukianovych, Mykola Ivasyuk.
One of Franko's articles, Sotsiializm i sotsiial-demokratyzm, a severe criticism of Ukrainian Social Democracy and the socialism of Marx and Engels, was published in 1898 in the journal Zhytie i Slovo, which he and his wife founded. He continued his anti-Marxist stance in a collection of poetry entitled Mii smarahd in 1898, where he called Marxism "a religion founded on dogmas of hatred and class struggle". His long-time collaborative association with Mykhailo Drahomanov was strained due to their diverging views on socialism and the national question. Franko would later accuse Drahomanov of tying Ukraine's fate to that of Russia in Suspil'nopolitychni pohliady M. Drahomanova, published in 1906. After a split in the Radical Party, in 1899, Franko, together with the Lviv historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, founded the National Democratic Party, where he worked until 1904 when he retired from political life.
Later career
In 1902, students and activists in Lviv, embarrassed that Franko was living in poverty, purchased a house for him in the city. He lived there for the remaining 14 years of his life. The house is now the site of the Ivan Franko Museum.In 1904 Franko took part in an ethnographic expedition in the Boyko areas with Filaret Kolesa, Fedir Vovk, and a Russian ethnographer.
1914 saw publication of his jubilee collection, Pryvit Ivanovi Frankovi, and of his collection Iz lit moyeyi molodosti.
In the last nine years of his life, Franko seldom physically wrote, as he suffered from rheumatism which eventually paralyzed his right arm. He was assisted as amanuensis by his sons, particularly Andriy.
In 1916, Josef Zastyretz and Harald Hjärne proposed Franko for the 1916 Nobel Prize in Literature, but he died before the nomination materialized.
Illness, death and burial
During the last eight years of his life Franko suffered from numerous sicknesses including migraines, tinnitus and polyarthritis, which were accompanied with fever, insomnia and hallucinations. After the start of the First World War, the author lost the care of his family, as his children Taras and Petro volunteered to the frontline, and his wife Olha was herself undergoing medical treatment in a psychiatric establishment. Starting from November 1915 Franko lived in a shelter organized for members of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. Suffering from new bouts of sickness, Ivan Franko died at the establishment at 4 pm on 28 May 1916.On his deathbed Franko refused confession from Greek Catholic priests. As a result, the Church initially refused to bury the author, who was reputed to have been an atheist: permission for a public funeral was received only after the gravity of Franko's symptoms, from which he had suffered immediately before his death, and which could be attributed to mental illness, was proven to authorities. On 31 May numerous visitors came to the late author's residence in Lviv to pay him last respect, including his son Petro, composer Vasyl Barvinsky, who directed the solemn choir, and lawyer Kost Levytsky, who made the funeral speech. The funeral procession was accompanied by soldiers of the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen.
Due to wartime conditions, it was impossible to immediately allocate a burial plot, so Franko's body was initially interred in a vault rented from another family. Only five years after his death, on 28 May 1921, Ivan Franko's remains were reburied on the main alley of Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv. In 1933 a monument depicting a stone-hewer, the main figure of one of Franko's famous poems, was opened at the site of his grave.