Chapter TEN: Ivan Franko

In the sixties the writers from Great Ukraine had begun to find shelter in Lviv and to seek opportunities for publishing there which had been denied to them in their native land. Yet, when they reached Galicia, they were passing into another atmosphere and another society. There were some like Kulish who tried to reconcile the Ukrainians and the Poles in the province of Austria-Hungary. There were others as Levitsky, whose works dealt only with the Russian Ukraine and who described the problems there as they saw them with their own eyes. They undoubtedly contributed much to the desire on the part of the people of Western Ukraine to remodel their lives and to commence social and national work. Yet they themselves were not at home in the complicated problems of Austro-Hungarian politics and the different social institutions and they rarely interested themselves in the many questions that were raised by the existence of Vienna and the Hapsburg monarchy and the obligations and possibilities that existed in Western Ukraine as a result of being a part of a great multilingual and confused area.

If literature in Western Ukraine was to find itself, it could do so only through the efforts of some one who was born and reared there and who understood the situation and the lives and thoughts of the people as a native and a true son of the country. Just as the literature of Great Ukraine had been responsive in some degree to the moods of Russian literature, so in Western Ukraine similar influence would be exerted by the various schools of Polish literature and the changing literary fashions of Vienna. No one from the outside could steer a direct course amid this confused and confusing situation. The language in the two sections might be identical but the overtones and the connotations would be very different, for even the presence of a few leaders from Great Ukraine in Galicia had not yet spun together all the threads that had been torn apart so completely centuries before. The man who was to found this literature and do more than his share in bringing together the two Ukraines was Ivan Franko, who is undoubtedly after Shevchenko the outstanding Ukrainian author.

It is hardly necessary to point out the differences between them. Shevchenko was a natural genius. Franko was far from that and in his works, talented and excellent as they are, there is not that supreme perfection, that incomparable greatness that there was in the older man. Their lives too are markedly different in every way. Shevchenko, the self-educated son of a serf, was born in the period when the Romantic movement was at its height. He was old enough to have thrilled in his youth to the tales of the men who had taken part in the last armed revolts of the Ukrainians and his mind often harped back to the heroic days of the past. There was something romantic and tragic in his life story. His liberation from serfdom, his service in the Russian army, his association with many of the broadminded aristocrats of his day, all lend themselves to the dramatic and the unusual.

There was none of this in Franko. He was more than well educated and his life is singularly empty of startling episodes. It is a prosaic record of duty recognized and executed, of articles written, of difficulties surmounted. If he ever had visions of riding into battle beside the great hetmans of the past, he did not bring himself to describe them. He offers us merely the commonplace spectacle of a hardworking journalist and editor winning his way by the sweat of his brow and the burning of the midnight oil. It was his task to remake the moral fibre of his people, to rebuild a shattered edifice and to expend superhuman energy in the process. All that does not lend itself to thrilling and unusual episodes but it is none the less valuable both for the man and his people. It is none the less important because it is not decked out with gaudy colors and with feats of physical daring and spectacular sufferings and endurance.

Ivan Franko was born August 15, 1856, in the little village of Nahuyevichi, in the foothills of the Carpathians only five years before the death of Shevchenko. He was the son of a poor farmer-blacksmith. The boy was not deprived of the opportunity of a formal education. Quite the reverse. He early learned to read and write Ukrainian, Polish and German and he received most of his early education in a German speaking school conducted by the Basilian Fathers. His father died when he was eight years old and his mother soon married again but his stepfather treated him kindly and helped him with his education.

On finishing the elementary schools, he entered the gymnasium in Drohobych and during his entire course he stood almost continuously at the head of his class. His clothes may have been ragged and tattered and he may have been shy and retiring, but he showed clearly that he had an acute mind and a great deal of endurance. He dabbled in literature along with many of his fellow students but there was still something youthful about his works and they did not appear in all of their later perfection.

In 1875 he entered the University of Lviv at a time when practically all the lectures were given in Polish and he was at once plunged into the frenzied academic debates about the problems of Galicia and the fate of the Ukrainians there. He listened for hours to the bitter partisanship over the form of the language to be used in the province and soon realized the sterility and artificiality of the entire controversy.

In his first period at the University, he drifted into the Academic Circle, a group of students that were rather Moscophile in tendency. At least this group had access to a journal which could publish his writings, and besides it appeared to be more serious and less devoted to society and frivolity than some of the groups that were more purely nationalistic.

It was about this time that he became interested in the writings of Mikhaylo Drahomaniv, (1841-1895) who was the leading Ukrainian scholar of the day. Drahomaniv, a great democrat, had taken a relatively advanced position and was frowned upon as a radical in many quarters. Yet he held firmly to the idea that the Ukrainians in both sections should cooperate closely and in order to work more freely in this connection he moved to Geneva, from which point he found it easier to communicate with the leaders on both sides of the Russian-Galician border, and later he was professor in the University of Sofia, Bulgaria.

Drahomaniv used his influence definitely against the Galician Moscophiles and he had no difficulty in pointing out that this group was an artificial and insincere creation, for at the very moment when its members were talking of adapting themselves to the Great Russian point of view, they were taking little interest in understanding what that point of view was and they were almost equally innocent of the achievements of Russian literature. In fact many could not even use Russian well. This policy brought Franko and Drahomaniv together and the younger man commenced a correspondence with Drahomaniv that continued until the latter’s death.

In 1877 Franko had his first taste of Austrian justice. He was arrested with many of his friends on the charge of being involved in political conspiracies with Drahomaniv and sentenced to nine months in prison. When he was finally released, much of the Ukrainian society of Lviv declined to meet him. He was forbidden to enter many of the gathering places and was treated as if he had been an ordinary criminal. The immediate result was a strengthening of his desire to pursue a direct course for the welfare of his people, as he saw it, and in 1878 with money which he received from Drahomaniv, who was supported from the Russian Ukraine, he commenced the publication of the _Hromadsky Druh_ to spread his ideas. The journal lasted about a year but was constantly in trouble with the censor. The work, however, brought Franko in contact with the socialists of the province. This had its good and bad sides. It brought him into contact with the Polish liberal journals and on the other hand it alienated from his influence many of the people of the conservative classes. The mood of the young poet can be well seen in the last stanza of the _Stone Cutters_, which he wrote at this time--

And so we moved ahead, united as one man
By sacred thought, with hammers in our hands.
Let us be cursed by all, forgotten by the world,
But we will break the rocks and build a proper road
And happiness will come for all from our lost bones.

The immediate result of all this activity was a second arrest in 1880 when he was travelling through the country and after three months in prison he was ordered sent back to his native village, but before he arrived, he was taken ill and after extreme privations and a long illness, he was allowed to return to some of his friends. In 1889 he was arrested a third time and kept in jail for three months without any formal charges being preferred against him.

During all this time he continued to write and in fact in the early eighties, he did much of his most significant work. He was not, however, satisfied and in 1885 he made a trip to Kiev to establish personal contacts with the Ukrainian leaders there and to arrange for the publication of their works in Lviv. The following year he returned to Kiev and there married Olha Khorunzhinska, a marriage which turned out very happily until his wife was taken ill in his later days.

For the next ten years he made his living by writing for various Polish liberal papers but he steadily became more disillusioned as to the possibility of creating a working harmony between the socialist parties of the two peoples. He came to believe that the ideal of socialism as preached by the Polish socialists toward the Ukrainian working people was not deep enough to bind the two peoples together. In 1897 in a review of _Konrad Wallenrod_, a poem by Mickiewicz, he criticized the idea that a man could become a national hero solely because of his treachery. Some of the Poles regarded this as an attack on their whole nation and it cost him most of his Polish friends and more seriously yet, his position as correspondent for various Polish papers but he did not change his opinions to better his financial status.

In 1892-1894 he studied at the University of Vienna and in 1894 he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy with a dissertation on Ivan Vishensky, a Ukrainian publicist of the early seventeenth century. He had high hopes of securing the chair of Ukrainian Literature at the University of Lviv and the faculty approved his candidacy. The governor of the province, however arbitrarily cancelled the nomination in view of his three arrests.

Then for a while he dabbled in Galician politics and would have won an election to the Diet in Vienna as the representative of the Radical Party, the first party of the Galician Ukrainians to be organized on a definite economic program, had he not been defeated by the most unashamed chicanery and cheating. After that he avoided politics in the strict sense of the word and continued his activities as writer, critic, scholar, and teacher of his people.

The response on the part of the people of Galicia and the respect which he had won were fully shown in the reception accorded him on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his entrance into literature in 1898 and again on the fortieth anniversary on the eve of the First World War, when the Shevchenko Scientific Society awarded him a yearly pension and the Ukrainians in Russia, Galicia and the United States raised for him the sum of 30,000 Austrian crowns.

His health began to fail in 1908 and he almost lost the use of his hands but he continued to work without any relaxation. The World War was an even more serious blow. His sons were mobilized in the Austrian army. The Russians penetrated into Lviv and Galicia and endeavored to put an end to all Ukrainian activities. Finally he died on May 28, 1916, just about two years before the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the temporary independence of Ukraine. His funeral was arranged by the Shevchenko Society and despite the restrictions of the war, over 10,000 people were in his funeral procession.

It is the simple story of a life devoted to the service of his people. Most of the controversies that Franko had with other Ukrainian leaders and the periods when he fell in disfavor were connected with that most severe problem of a leader, how to guide his people in a democratic spirit and at the same time not be so far ahead of them that he loses touch with their feelings and their beliefs and preaches to them real truths which they cannot and do not wish to comprehend. He summarized his obligations as he saw them in the preface to the Polish translation of the _Galician Sketches_:

“Before all I confess it as a sin, that many patriots regard me as destructive; I do not love the Rusins. Compared with that burning love, which comes often ‘for a brother race’ from the pen of Polish conservative journalists, my confession may seem strange. What is to be done, if it is true. I am not one of those naive and blind lovers and I can speak soberly about such a tender subject as love. I affirm again: I do not love the Rusins. I have found so few among them of righteous character, and so much pettiness, narrow material egotism, duplicity and pride, that I really do not know for what I could love them, remembering constantly the thousands of greater and lesser darts, that they have planted in my skin, often with the best ideas. It is understood that there are exceptions, many pure personalities, worthy of all respect among the Rusins (I am speaking of the intelligentsia, not the villagers), but these exceptions unfortunately only confirm the general statement.

“I accept it as a great sin; even our Rus I do not love at least as our patented patriots do or pretend to do. What is there to love in it? To love it as a geographical conception, I am a foe of empty phrases and I have seen too much of the world to be able to say that there is no such beautiful nature as in Rus. To love its history, I know it well and I love too warmly the general human ideals of justice, brotherhood, and freedom not to recognize how few examples there are in the history of Rus of real community spirit, just sacrifice, true love. But it is important to love this history, for at every time it is necessary to weep over it. Why can I love Rus as a race--this race which is hard, intractable, sentimental, a race without temper or strength of will, so little adapted for political life on its own behalf, and so fertile in producing renegades of every kind? How can I love the bright future of this Rus, which I do not know, when I cannot see any basis for this bright future?

“But if on the other hand, I feel myself a Rusin and with all of my strength I work for Rus as the honored reader will see, it is not from reasons of a sentimental nature. I am guided before all by a feeling of a canine obligation. The son of a Rusin peasant, reared on black peasant bread, the work of stout peasant hands, I feel myself bound by the labor of my whole life to repay those coins which a peasant hand has expended, so that I can ascend to the heights, where one can see clearly, where freedom is poured out richly, where universal ideals shine. My Rusin patriotism is not sentiment, not national pride, but a great yoke placed by fate upon my shoulders. I can protest, I can quietly curse my fate, for placing that yoke upon me, but I cannot throw it off, I cannot seek another country, or I would be base against my own doubts. And if anything lightens for me the burden of this yoke, it is the sight of the Rusin people, that, although bent, deafened and demoralized for long centuries, although today poor, awkward, and joyless, yet is gradually advancing and perceives somehow in the widest circles the feelings of light, truth, justice and is seeking approach to them. It is worth while to work for this people and no honorable work for it is lost.”

We can well understand how such plain speaking aroused criticism against Franko among those Ukrainians who were flattering the people and at the same time hindering their educational advance and the improvement of their social conditions. From the very beginning of his work Franko took as his goal the good of the people. He realized that it was no easy task and that his path would not be strewn with roses. He realized the opposition that he would encounter not only from his opponents but also from those whom he was trying to help. Yet he approached his task with the coldly realistic manner of the end of the century when the hopes of decisive and rapid changes had practically vanished from the minds of most people and when it was fully understood that only hard work and slow social reform could benefit the people.

Yet it did not curb his enthusiasm or his belief in the undying spirit of liberty and the good in man. He summed it up in his poem _The Eternal Revolutionist_,

A revolutionist eternally
Man’s spirit, driving him to fight
For progress, liberty and right.
It lives, it cannot die.

(Translated by Arthur P. Coleman)

This theme runs through all of his collections, especially of the early days and the titles are themselves suggestive. _From the Heights and Depths_, _Sad Songs_, _Night Thoughts_, _The Thoughts of a Proletarian_, _Ukraine_, _Prison Sonnets_, _Galician Sketches_, _Jewish Melodies_. The overwhelming mass of his poems especially in his early years and until about 1893 dealt with various social problems. They pictured the hardships of society, of the common man and of the poet himself in his aspirations to do something before the people. They run through all forms of lyrical verse, sonnets, _et cetera_, and form a good poetic picture of conditions as they were in Western Ukraine with the constant struggle against the Polish lords.

It is very rare that Franko creates a true narrative poem and the best example is the _Nobleman’s Pranks_, a picture of peasant life in Galicia on the eve of the abolition of serfdom. Pan Mihucki, a strong willed Polish landlord, could not believe that this liberation would ever take place. He could not believe either that the peasant had any rights, even those which were guaranteed by the law. When the devoted priest on his estate endeavored to preach temperance and to teach the children to read and write, the autocratic master ordered him to be put to work in the fields like a common peasant despite the laws of the land which exempted priests from such labor. The priest was compelled to work until he dropped dead. The imperial commissioner, an Austrian German, tried in vain to moderate the lord’s wrath when he learned that serfdom had been abolished and when all remedies were useless, and the new order was introduced, he placed the Polish landlord in jail. It was an overwhelming shock to Pan Mihucki and though he was soon released, his time was over and within a year he died abroad. His widow returned but she was entirely in the power of the Jewish agent who held the mortgages on the estate and soon she too disappeared, “And Moshko bought the village.” It was a grim warning of a situation that was far too common in Galicia and not generally recognized.

The priest is one of those types that Franko particularly appreciated and to which he returns again and again. He is a man who does all that he can for his fellows and perishes in his attempts to aid them but at the time he is so conscious of how much more he could have done, that he feels no self-satisfaction even amid the plaudits of others.

This type of a lost leader appears in a poignant form in the _Death of Cain_. Old Cain who has struggled with the curse of God for centuries finally learns that the way to a peaceful and quiet life is through the virtues of a man’s own heart. He returns to men to tell them of the new truth and his great grandson Lamech, old and blind, shoots him with an arrow directed by a little child. Ignorance and misunderstanding prevent Lamech from learning the message that the old sufferer had wished to give him.

Of his lyrical collections perhaps the most musical are the _Three Garlands of the Fallen Leaves_ which appeared between 1893 and 1896. They are personal poems dealing with the emotion of love and pain. In the first Garland they emphasize disappointment. In the second pain is treated as a cult and in the third, Franko glorifies a feeling of detachment from sensation, a lack of feeling, with a tendency to glorify Buddha and to approach Nirvana even through suicide. Some of his critics accused him of accepting the philosophy of the decadents. He repudiated the idea but these poems strike an unusual note in Franko’s general attitude of eternal confidence in the human spirit. Still they are among his best work and together with the collection _My Emerald_, written during a period of illness, they are among his most deeply musical creations.

Perhaps the greatest of his longer poems is _Moses_ which he wrote in 1905, and we cannot fail to see in it a certain hidden autobiographical touch and to regard the Hebrews as types of the contemporary Ukrainians. Moses, the great prophet, has led his people into the wilderness with the promise of a happier and a more abundant life. Yet the new world is not forthcoming and the people whom he has aroused to action, murmur against him and prefer the advice of the false prophets. Moses defies them and wins but he withdraws from them to go alone and by himself to the Promised Land. Yet hardly has he left when doubts begin to assail him. Can he be sure that he has been on the right path? Can he be sure that he has acted properly in rousing the people in the beginning? He grows more and more discouraged and finally loses faith in God. While the evil spirit mocks him, he curses Jehovah and can therefore not enter the Promised Land. Yet the people without him willingly obey the call of Joshua and press on to their destined goal. His sufferings have not been in vain but that one moment of unbelief has wrecked his chance to go with them to happiness.

Franko in the last years of his life had many such moments of discouragement. He shows it clearly in the preface to _Moses_, when he proudly asserts that there will come a time when his people will achieve their goal and be masters in their house from the Caucasus to the Beskids, even though the way seems dark and hopeless at the time. He realized that with his failing health he could not be the leader until the struggle for freedom would reach a victorious ending. He knew that there was no one else to take his place at the time, but he never lost hope that the right man would appear and like Joshua carry the cause to triumph.

In addition to his original poems, he enriched Ukrainian literature with many translations, especially from English and German. He early published lengthy translations from Byron, Goethe, Heine, and other writers and he commented extensively on the literature of his own country and that of Western Europe.

Yet poetry was not his only mode of literary expression. He was a prolific writer of novels and short stories. All of these aimed to show forth by example the great truths which he felt in his poetry and which he expounded in his journalistic writings.

Let us take for example _Zakhar Berkut_, a historical novel of the Ukrainian people in the Carpathian Mountains in the thirteenth century, which he wrote in 1882 and for which he received a prize offered by the journal _Zorya_. The Boyar Tuhar Vovk was given domains by Danilo the Prince of Halich. There he exercised certain rights and powers in opposition to the peasant tradition and he refused to submit them to adjudication before the council of the villagers under their chosen head, Zakhar Berkut, a peasant of some ninety years of age whose mind was still keen, even if his body was aging. All the efforts of the Boyar to assert himself against the wishes of the people came to naught. As one man they stood together and thwarted all his schemes. Even when the Boyar became a traitor to his people and allied himself with the Tatar invaders, it did no good, for the villagers were able to flood the path over which the attackers had to move. The love affair between Berkut’s son and the daughter of the Boyar is rather colorless and stereotyped. The novel reads well and even the editors who awarded him the prize did not grasp the obvious moral that the people would be invincible, if they would but unite under a rational and sane leadership to defend their rights. Power and legality cannot come from mere words. They rest upon concerted action and that is the one thing that the villagers of his day did not wish to see.

He returns again and again to this same theme and in one of his latest novels, the _Crossed Paths_, he unites this theme with the same lesson which could be drawn from the _Nobleman’s Pranks_. The scene is in Galicia of the present day and the young lawyer Dr. Rafalovich is surprised to learn that the great landowners are as hopelessly in debt to the Jewish money lenders as are the peasants to their tavern keepers. This lawyer has decided to devote himself to the cause of the people and so has developed a laborious practice among the Ukrainians instead of seeking a more lucrative one among the Poles. In that region one of the big estates was being sold at auction and Dr. Rafalovich realizes how easy it would be for the villagers to secure their own land. Yet not one peasant is willing to trust another to cooperate in the transaction. One and all want the land, they realize that they cannot be prosperous without it but they will not work together or trust one another, in order to secure it. They much prefer to grumble rather than to show a modicum of common sense and win. On the other hand the romantic part of the story is equally sad. Rafalovich has loved a girl in Lviv. Now he finds her married to a drunken sadist who is insanely jealous of her and does everything to make her life unbearable. Both she and her husband die. Rafalovich is arrested, and though he is cleared of all charges and released, something has gone out of him and he is tormented by doubts as to the sense of the course which he has followed.

Franko realized that the new conditions after the abolition of serfdom were not ideal and in one of his early stories the _Boa Constrictor_ he pictured the evils of the growing industrialization of the neighborhood of Borislav and the consequent fate of the workers who are kept in an economic serfdom which was as bad as that of the enslaved villagers. This was another theme that he treated again and again throughout his life.

Another subject that interested him was the inhumanity of one man to another especially as regards family life. Thus in _For the Home Hearth_ the hero Captain Anharovich returns from Bosnia to Galicia only to learn that his wife has been trapped into recruiting girls for the purposes of prostitution. When she is finally unmasked, she commits suicide and her husband is thus allowed to continue his career and maintain his honor as an army officer, although the rumors of his wife’s disgrace have led him into a duel with his best friend and broken his own heart.

Questions of peasant marriage also concerned him greatly and in his best play, _Stolen Happiness_, which won a second prize in a competition at Lviv he criticizes the arbitrary way in which such unions were arranged. A soldier returns from his army service to find that the girl whom he loved and who loved him had been forced into marriage with another man. Such happenings were relatively common and they aroused the enmity of Franko as much as did the abuse of his people by outside oppressors.

It would be too long to list all of his stories and collections which range from autobiographical studies as in the _Sweat of the Brow_, stories taken from adventures and incidents in his whole life, to studies of peasant customs in every form. In all of them Franko was willing to see the good as well as the bad and he gave invaluable pictures of Galician life in the period from 1880 to 1914.

Yet it is to be noticed that in many of these stories as in the _Nobleman’s Pranks_, he has kind words for the representatives of the Austrian government at Vienna, who were mostly Austrian Germans, although some were of Slavic origin.

This was only natural for Franko rarely left his native land except for the two years in Vienna. During his lifetime the Poles had a strangle hold on the government of Galicia. They were the direct oppressors of the people and the Viennese government in many cases tried to mitigate the iron hand of the provincial administration, partly from a feeling of justice and partly from self-interest. The Hapsburg policy had always been to allow a relatively free hand to the dominant group in a province and then to favor and help in minor ways the oppressed sections of the province. In this way they hoped to maintain a policy of “Divide and Conquer” and to facilitate their own control of the entire area.

Almost universally also he refers to his people as Rusins or Ruthenians. The name of Ukraine was taboo for political purposes in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Franko would merely have been courting trouble and injuring his own work, had he not followed the usual practice. At times as in his poem _Ukraine_, he uses the word for the larger entity. At the same time he worked steadily for the promotion of closer relationships with the people in Great Ukraine. He did not regard it possible that the two groups, the one in Austria-Hungary and the other in Russia would be able to cooperate freely until the two great Empires met with shipwreck and thus permitted the establishment of a united and independent Ukraine. In both sections there were the same economic problems of an oppressed agricultural race struggling against a dominant aristocracy, largely composed of persons who had risen out of their own soil and adopted a more aristocratic language and mode of life. The danger of assimilation was however greater in Russia than in Galicia where the process had largely slowed down some centuries before, and so many of the themes which had stirred Levitsky and others seem to pass unnoticed by Franko.

In the same way his literary models were those of Western Europe rather than those of Russia. From his youth he was well educated in German and he wrote for German as well as Polish papers. He was affected by the types of writing common there, even more than by the developments in Russia.

Despite all of the persecutions and the hardships that he had to meet, he had still more abundant opportunities to express himself freely on the political and social theories which he advocated than did the authors who wrote in Russia, but he had to adapt himself to the framework of the Hapsburg empire. Within that he struggled long and strenuously for the welfare of his people. At times he was very popular and his ideas caught public fancy. At times he stood alone and felt to some degree that which Moses and his other lost leaders realized, that he was ahead of his time, that he was not accomplishing all that he had intended, that his words were not being interpreted in the sense in which he meant them.

He suffered from discouragement but long before his death men of all parties recognized that he was the chief teacher, poet, and novelist of the province. They realized his incorruptible character, his wide knowledge and his literary talent. He was not the peer of the incomparable Shevchenko but next to him he stood out as the most important talent in Ukrainian literature, the greatest scholar, and the one man who could see the problems of his people and the path on which they should go. His enormous funeral bore token to the esteem in which he was held and to the work which he had done during the unremitting years of journalism. Franko worked hard. His life was uneventful. It was not filled with surprising and unusual episodes but as scholar, critic, poet, novelist and teacher he deserved well of Ukraine and was the glory of the Shevchenko Scientific Society.