Ivan Franko. Use of English B1+

Ivan Franko was a great poet, prose writer, script writer, literary critic, translator, journalist, and public figure. He left a rich legacy … of nearly five thousand fiction and nonfiction works, theoretical, essays and articles written in Ukrainian, Polish, German and other languages.

Ivan Franko was born … August 27th, 1856, in the village of Nahuyevichi, county of Drohobich, province of Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father was a peasant who was also the village blacksmith.

Ivan Franko lived in the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the popular risings of 1848 and the defeat suffered at the hands of Prussia in 1867 had forced the Habsburg monarchy to renounce serfdom and grant certain concessions (in order to maintain its rule), and so the transition to the new capitalist relations … place along with the retention of as many as possible of the old feudal ways of life.

The peasants were no longer serfs, although many of them still remembered and bore the scars of serfdom. They were free now. But the bulk of the land remained in the hands of the big landowners. The little … which the farmers received for their own were barely enough to sustain life. Moreover, they had to pay compensation for their liberty.

Actually, they still worked the landlords' estates, but now for a pittance wage, and the landlords were no longer obliged to see to it that they didn't starve to death between harvests.

Soon many of them lost their plots and became full-time hired men or went begging. ... Ivan Franko was later to … the bitter saying that was current among the peasants:

"We survived serfdom, and somehow we'll manage to survive the constitution!"

In that cruel and fantastic set-up that was the Austro-Hungarian empire, the provinces … by Ukrainians were kept poor and backward, treated as a colony of the ruling nations.

And in order to keep this many-nationed house of cards from falling apart, a cynical and elaborate system of "divide and rule" was built up, using one nationality against the other while piously … "cultural autonomy" and "harmony between the nations.

Thus the Habsburgs … privileges to the big Polish landowners over the Ukrainians in Galicia, the same with the Hungarians in regard to the Slovaks and Trans-Carpathian Ukrainians, the same among the Southern Slavs that were in the empire.

On the other hand, they sought to exploit the natural hatred of the Ukrainians for their Polish, Hungarian and Austrian oppressors to … the democratic forces in Vienna, Budapest or Cracow.

Government policy was against the development of industry in Galicia. Except for the primary industries, such as the cutting down of the forests in the Carpathians and the digging for oil, the province remained an area of the most backward agriculture and petty artisan workshops, as in the Middle Ages. And as for the timber and the oil-the logs were cut and the oil … for transportation to other, more favoured parts of the empire, and for lucrative export abroad.

For all its show of strength, for all the seeming success of its "divide and rule" policy, the Austro-Hungarian empire was entering the period of growing crisis and ultimate dissolution. And in the second half of the 19th Century a new force had come on the world stage - the industrial working class and the socialist movement, which … the main social force in the 20th Century, undertaking the task of transforming human society altogether.

It was as the harbinger of socialism that Ivan Franko considered himself to be "the prologue," the forerunner of a New Age.

JUST LIKE Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko came out of the very mass of the common people and his own experiences from boyhood on helped to set his feet on the road of social consciousness and struggle … the people.

His father, Yakiv, was a good workman and a good man generally. He was a man of progressive views and it is certain that little Ivan got his first social impulses from listening to his father - it was to him that he dedicated his first collection of verses, and time and again he likens the work of public … to a smithy, as in the following:

The village in a valley lies,

And mists above the village rise, While beyond it, on a height,

Stands a smithy big and bright.

There's a blacksmith in that smithy, Warm of heart and quick to pity;

As to steel his hammer rings

This the song he loudly sings:

"Here from field and home foregather!

Better life we'll forge together

In this smithy-don't delay, Lest the mist befog your way!"

When Ivan was six years old his father sent him to school in a neighboring village. Education in Galicia at that time was in the Polish and German languages and was mainly promoted with the aid of the … . Moreover, any "mouzhik" child that ventured to go to school was fair game for both the brutal teachers and his classmates of "better birth."

The prominent Ukrainian writer, Mikhailo Kotsiubinsky, described Ivan Franko's schooldays thus:

"Notwithstanding everything, the extraordinarily gifted child learned to read Ukrainian, Polish and German in that village school. After two years his father sent him to the German common school, conducted in a monastery in the town of Drohobich. The frightened village child, unkempt and poorly clothed, became the … of the pupils.

They beat him and ridiculed him. Franko described the barbarism of the teachers in his stories "Schon Schreiben" and "The Pencil," which are of an autobiographical nature. And already at that time eternal hatred of all oppression and tyranny, of man's violence to man, was born in Franko's childish heart. A year passed, along came the examinations - and little Franko … everybody: he proved to be at the top of the class.

"Soon after that, Franko's father died and his mother married again. But though the family became poorer, without the … that existed when his father was alive, he was not taken out of school. In town he lived with a relative, a cabinet maker, where he listened to the talk of working folk, learned songs, slept on an empty crate which had been prepared for the market or in a coffin, and helped with the work. When summer holidays came he went back to the village, where he helped to make hay in the field and to bring in the harvest again.

"Three years later Franko was sent to the gimnazia (se-condary school - J.W.). There, too, the mouzhik's son went through the same experiences as at the primary school. They paid Franko no attention, he sat the entire term out in a corner on the donkey's bench' and … holes in the walls with his fingers. And then he again took top honours in the studies and stayed at the top during his entire course at the gimnazia."

It was a hard school and from it Ivan Franko learned more than was on the … .

He chose his road early and he never left it.

ALTHOUGH he was a very good student, Ivan Franko did not like school. He was getting his real education outside the classroom. The world of books was now open to him, and he read voraciously.

Even as a mere lad he had learned Shevchenko's "Kobzar"' practically all by heart. He read Panas Mirny and other Ukrainian authors. And also from boyhood he began to collect Ukrainian folklore, proverbs, tales, folk songs - he wrote down more than 800 songs from his native village and the neighboring region alone. And … with 1868, when he was twelve years old, he himself began to try his own skill at writing.

Mikhailo Kotsiubinsky relates:

"His first efforts to write, both verse and prose, go back to the time when Franko was in the gimnazia. At that time, too, he had already begun to collect folk songs. When the young Franko left for Lvov University in 1875, he had everything in his literary baggage: love poems, plays, novels and translations of Sophocles, Homer, Gutzkow's 'Uriel Acosta,' the Kraledvor Chronicle, etc.

"In Lvov the … student joined the student circle and took a lively part in editing the student magazine 'Friend,' in which Franko's first verses were published in 1874 under the pen-name of Jedjalik."

The rising ferment in Galicia itself, the impact of the revolutionary ideas and struggles in russia and the workers' and socialist movements of Western Europe all cotributed to the formation of the young man's world outlook.

"The struggle of the working people of Galicia against their oppressors increased in the second half of the 19th Century," relates the authoritative "History of Ukrainian Literature" (Kyiv, 1954). "The landlessness of the peasants and the artificial retarding of the development of industry caused famine and unemployment in the province.

Already in the 1870's a wave of workers' strikes … through the Galician cities, and in the 1880's and 1890's the peasant rallies at times took on the character of popular protests against social enslavement. The liberation movement also began among the other Slavic nations of Austro-Hungary.

"The influence of the works of Shevchenko and other revolutionary democrats - Belinsky, Hertsen, Cher-nishevsky, Dobrolyubov, Nekrasov, Saltykov-Shchedrin - and the propagation of socialist ideals among the masses of workers and peasants in the conditions of the rise of the liberation movement inevitably could not … to give rise to such political thought in Galicia.

Ivan Franko now had access to the literary gems and foremost ideas of all the advanced countries - he was proficient in Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, German, Bulgarian, French and other languages.

It was in hot polemics with the "Populist" and the "Muscophile" trends among the Galician intellectuals (the "Populists" sought little favours for themselves from the Austrian emperor, while the "Muscophiles" orientated themselves on the russian Tsar, both were conservative and contemptuous of the Ukrainian common people) that Ivan Franko and the group which he led forged their social views, tried out their youthful pens, set their feet on the road of political struggle.

- The Galician reactionaries were troubled by these "in-sane" young people, who were attacking their positions. They informed on them to the Austrian authorities, and in 1877 Ivan Franko and other members of the editorial board of the student magazine "Friend" were arrested and … "subversive" activities and the "propagation of socialism." After seven months in jail awaiting trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to six weeks' imprisonment … the time he had already spent in jail didn't count.