Transcription
My people, tortured, broken, like a paralytic, at the crossroads. Only a genius could address you and me with such words, and it was with these words that the Prologue to the famous poem "Moisei" by Ivan Franko began. However, my acquaintance with Franko began in a completely different way.
Spring came, beautiful, multi-colored, warm, clear, like a girl in Nikita's beloved Lys. It is one of the first memories that entered my childhood soul with ease. Indeed, only a genius could speak on an equal footing with philosophers and with children.
In 1764, in the Drohobytsky District, the last witch in these regions was burned. The name of the unfortunate victim has not been preserved; we only know where it happened, in the village of Naguyevichi. After 70 years, a bonfire is lit again in the same village. Galicia itself is suffering from a cholera epidemic, but in the eyes of the villagers, people don't die of disease; their blood is silenced.
Two such people found each other—the inhabitants of the village—and were burned at the fire. This happened only 20 years before the birth of Ivan Franko, one of the first modern intellectuals who was destined to lead his people out of the world of superstitions into the European space of the early 20th century. They say that they eat half and work for a quarter; three-quarters of the population of the region are illiterate, and every second peasant child dies in the first years of life.
But most of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as the whole of Europe, is on the threshold of great changes. Soon, an oil field will be opened in Boryslav, the third in the world at that time. A railway will be laid to the nearby Drohobych, and along with it, new goods, people, and ideas will come to Galicia. However, the villages are still almost untouched by these changes; people here live as they did a century ago.
Franko was born at a time when Galicia was destined to become the cradle of the three nationalisms: Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish—three nations that have their own state and are waiting for their own prophets. By a strange coincidence, Franko is baptized not by an ordinary priest, but by a poet, the author of the first Galician-Russian grammar, Father Yosyp Levytskyi, exiled in Naguyevych for his sharp tongue. The newborn is given the name Ivan, but at home, he will be called by another name—Myron. There is a belief that if you call a child by a different name, then you can fool death, which will not be able to recognize it.
Almost 100 years have passed since the witch was burned, but in Pera, werewolves still live in folk folklore. Little Franko woke up trembling with fear more than once after listening to these stories from maids or peasants in his father's forge. He collected these tales all his life.
As a professional ethnographer, Franko's family was not superstitious. In his memories, Ivan speaks of his parents as the beginning of the future rural intelligentsia. The Franks in Naguyevych were considered wealthy; they had servants and owned 24 hectares of land, which is more than anyone in the village. Franko's father, Yakiv, probably came from Ukrainianized German colonists; at least that's what Franko himself thought. Mother Maria was 30 years younger than her husband and from an impoverished but glorious noble family. Her distant relatives were the Cossack Hetman Konashevich Sahaidachnyi and Yuriy Kulchytskyi, the owner of a Viennese coffee shop, who was said to have taught all of Europe to drink coffee.
After 200 years, his descendant from the Carpathian village had to teach Vienna to deal with Ukrainians for the second time. On July 1, 1893, the Ukrainian language was heard for the first time at the University of Vienna. The 36-year-old Ivan Franko receives the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from his teacher, Academician Kvatroslav Yagich, who considers him the most capable of all to speak the Ukrainian language. Not only Yagich, but also the whole of Vienna warmly welcomes the famous publicist and writer from Lviv. In the eyes of the German-speaking intelligentsia, he personifies everything progressive and modern that comes from the eastern provinces.
It is unlikely that Yakov Franko could have imagined that his son would be nominated for the Nobel Prize in the future. His decision to send his son to the gymnasium was exceptional. In addition, the peasant family simply could not afford to give up free labor. Even Franko's younger brothers, who were said in the village to be no less perceptive, were forced to help their parents and grew up as ordinary peasants.
What fate awaited his older brother? For his firstborn, Yakiv Franko wished for a better fate. Education opened up a wide world for the little Myron, but the life path that he would have to go through would be neither easy nor peaceful. He would also know prison walls and all kinds of torment and violence of people against people, and he would end up either dying somewhere in the poverty of loneliness or from the prison walls carrying the germ of a deadly disease.
But Franko does not try on the martyr's clothes. After graduating from the gymnasium, he enters Lviv University as the best student, in a suit tailored to a European manner. He strives to meet the standards and tastes of the educated public of that time. In Franko's plans to become a popular writer, he is close to realizing his dreams. Already, his first works published in local publications make him a well-known figure in Lviv. Franko signs himself with the salon pseudonym Jadzhalyk, which is an approximate equivalent to the English "Dandy."
At only 20 years old, a tempting prospect of success opens up for the young writer. A career and a cloudless future await him. After the one-story Drohobych, Lviv seems to Franko to be a real metropolis, the social and political life of which boils. Lviv at that time is compared to the Tower of Babel; its streets speak Polish, German, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. It is true that Galician Ukrainians call themselves Ruthenians and have a rather vague idea of who they are and where they are from originally.
The center of the Ukrainian community in Lviv was the People's House, a kind of local club for the intelligentsia and bureaucracy. The local elite came here in the evenings to have a good time. The son of a village blacksmith enthusiastically seeks the recognition of a society that seems to him brilliant and refined. He does not notice that his new friends call their people something like "guys."
But soon, Franko will meet a man whose acquaintance will change his entire future life. This person was the famous Kyiv professor Mykhailo Drahomanov. When Drahomanov, who at that time had already traveled half of Europe, comes to Lviv, his first impression of meeting the Lviv intelligentsia describes tables with maps, and behind them sit famous patriots, professors, writers, and politicians. For the sake of maps, they abandon any conversation about the most pressing issues—patriotic, folk, and literary.
This brilliant intellectual and polemicist, Drahomanov, harshly ridicules the Frankish authorities of that time. His merciless criticism affects the young poet like a cold soul. He even thinks about suicide, although fortunately, it did not come to that. However, the acquaintance with Drahomanov costs Franko very dearly. A case is fabricated against him; he is arrested and spends almost a year in prison for his political views.
But Franko comes out of prison a completely different person. The secular dandy dies in him forever. The new Franko chooses a new pseudonym for himself, a name from his rural childhood—Myron. Although he, as he himself admitted, was not very inclined to peasant work, already being a doctor of philosophy, he defiantly called himself a peasant. It was up to Franko to emphasize that he is a Ukrainian and he is with the people. He did the same as Taras Shevchenko, but Franko was more concerned with how to make Ukrainian culture European and fashionable. In other words, how to wear a European suit of jeans and an embroidered jacket over a vyshyvanka.
In the case of Franko, a suit and an embroidered jacket—such a combination will not surprise anyone today, but 100 years ago, this eclecticism was met with surprise by some, indignation by others, and simply laughter by others. Even during Franko's life, thousands of young Ukrainians, imitating him, wore an embroidered shirt under the suit.
At the end of the 19th century, Vienna becomes the capital of the decadent movement, an artistic trend that sings of the death and decline of civilization. It is not by chance that he finds favorable soil. It is here in Austria that an era is dying, and the Habsburg Empire is dying. Franko meets with Tomasz Masaryk, the future first president of Czechoslovakia, and Teodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. All three belong to peoples who for centuries did not have their own state, and it is the 20th century that gives perhaps the last chance to be reborn on the ruins of the empire.
But it should not be assumed that politics and science make up the whole life of Franko in Vienna. After the Congress of Social Democrats, at which Franko delivered the Central Report—by the way, which will be reprinted not only by local newspapers but also by the London Times—he is seen here in the Prater, a resting place for the Viennese, in the company of a beautiful girl with whom he dances all night.
Stubbornly twisting his leg, Franko himself wrote only three times, "Love appeared to me." But here, the poet cunningly fell in love; he fell in love much more often. At the end of the 19th century, in Western Europe, a sexual revolution began that would last until the 60s of the 20th century. The hippie "free love" slogan arose during Franko's time, although under "free love," they then understood unconstrained sex and something else. The sexual revolution took place under the banner of feminism, as women demanded equal rights in work, life, and love, including the ability to choose a lover or divorce an unloved one.
Franko was a supporter of such a concept, which outraged his contemporaries even more for his Ukrainianness and socialism. Imagine what an innocent conversation between two people on the street was for Lviv at that time. Intermediaries were considered a dishonor, after which a boy could be forced to marry a girl. Franko, as a supporter of feminism, invited women to the theater café of the library.
What can be said when, in just one year, he offered his hand and heart to three girls at once: the poet Julia Schneider, the teacher Klementina Popovych, and the daughter of a rich nobleman, Olga Bilynska? Each of them knew about the competitors, and he never married any of the women. They forgave the poet everything because they had respect for his authority, and they understood that love did not inspire him to write poems.
But Franko would not be Franko if he had not transformed even his marriage into the national cause. He used the example of his own family to prove the possibility of uniting the Ukrainian west and east. His wife, a native of Kyiv, Olga Khorozhynska, also had to put up with a lot. For example, the staff that Olga's parents gave to buy an apartment in Lviv, her husband spent on publishing a magazine. Most of the joint life of the Franko spouses involved moving from place to place, renting apartments.
Khorozhynska turned out to be adamant only in one way: being a follower of Leo Tolstoy, she did not consider household chores to be purely women's work. So, the writer often had to go for groceries and prepare food himself. By the way, it was his wife who persuaded Franko to go to Vienna. She hoped that this would improve the financial situation of the family. At that time, the Frankos lived only on Ivan's modest earnings from journalism and literary activities.
Franko could, if he wished, make a career here in the center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is the usual path for talented people from the provinces, but he leaves Vienna, where he is his own among strangers, for the sake of Lviv, where he becomes a stranger among his own. Franko hopes for the department of Ukrainian literature at the University of Lviv, but neither the recommendations from Vienna nor the doctoral title helped him.
Franko does not grow hair on his palm faster than he becomes an associate professor. People who walk in such a turban give a professorship. A red-haired man will probably go to Prosvita here and give him a father's name. At 40 years old, a person usually knocks out the first results of his life. At this age, Franko finally becomes an outcast in the eyes of his own. He is hated by his enemies, feared by the ruling elite, and not understood by his friends. They call him the main nihilist and demoralizer of Galicia. Some see him as the leader of dangerous ideas coming from the west, shaking the established traditional world. Some simply envy him.
Talented Franko is allowed to teach at the university, but he organizes trips to his native land, where students study the customs and folklore of their own people. From these journeys, a whole generation of scientists, politicians, and military personnel will emerge—the first generation that will call themselves Ukrainians. The older generation turns their shoulders to Franko. Old acquaintances, seeing him, cross to the other side of the street. He has already been in prison three times because of his socialist views and nationalism about the oppression of Ukrainians by the Poles.
He loses the only permanent place of work in the Polish-speaking Lviv region. Some Polish chauvinists even try to shoot him; luckily, they don't hit him. But under the French windows, an effigy appears hanging on a pole with a sign that says, "Franko will die like this."
But for young people, Franko is a cult writer, the author of the first detective novels and modernist poems—a Ukrainian erudite who knows 14 languages and translates modern literature. For young people, he has authority, and only the words of Franko are listened to.
To destroy Franko, and even more so, no one has succeeded in destroying his ideas. The Soviet government had no choice but to adapt him to its own ideology, so Franko became a stonemason in school textbooks. The eternal revolutionary really suits Franko, but he is only one of the many that make up his figure.
Franko not only spread Chernyshevsky among university youth, but he also translated Marx's "Capital," which was also confiscated during the arrest, into boyish language. He was also going to translate it into boyish language. "Yes, I want to translate 'Capital'; people must read it," he said, "because he understood the revolution not at all the way it was taught."
The party on these shelves stores everything that Ivan Franko wrote. He was a real workaholic. Once, when he was young, he joked that if he continued to work at this pace, he would not collect 50 volumes by the end of his life. In fact, during his life, Franko wrote more than 6,000 works. Every two days, a poem, a poem, or a newspaper article was published. They say that if an ordinary person wants to simply rewrite everything that Franko wrote, she will not have enough of her own life.
Today, a hundred volumes of morning papers are already being prepared. Many of them have not yet been published; others were silenced by Soviet censorship. For example, here is this article in which Franko described the communist state in this way: "The own will and own opinion of each individual person would have to disappear because suddenly the state recognizes it as harmful and unnecessary. People would grow up and live in such dependence under such care of the state that now the most absolute police states have no language. The people's state has become a huge people's prison."
Franko's eldest son has already turned 15 when the family finally moved into their own house. Part of the money for the construction was collected by the students; others had to borrow from the bank. But Franko did not manage to repay the loan for 10 years after his death. The debt was paid by his children. He would not live until a year before the creation of the Ukrainian state with the capital in Kyiv, the first president of which was a good acquaintance of Franko's, Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, and two years before the West Ukrainian People's Republic on the lands of Galicia.
Young people always gathered around Franko. For them, these meetings were something like a discussion club. At one of these meetings, which lasted until the morning, the idea of creating the first political party, the Ukrainian Radical Party, which was headed by himself, was born. Under Franko's influence, dozens of prominent figures of the 20th century—not only Ukrainians—began their careers.
Under Franko's influence, the first politician became the prime minister of independent Poland, Ignatius Daszynski. From the circle of Franko's young acquaintances emerged the entire Ukrainian Bohemia of young poets of the new European style, as well as almost the entire future leadership of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, who would fight for the Ukrainian State during the First World War.
It was here that Ivan Franko wrote his famous poem "Moisei." In 1980, Vasyl Stus' son received a letter from his father, who was in bed. Vasyl Stus writes that after reading "Moisei" in the ninth grade, he gave up on the idea of becoming a geologist and decided to become a poet. "Son, I really want you to be an honest, courageous, and wise man. Because a person is only like that; others will live and die."
Was she a person? Did she have a life, or did she leave behind a legacy? Stus died in a distant Perm camp for political prisoners five years before the symbolic living chain would connect Lviv and Kyiv, realizing the main dream of Franko's life.
"My people, tortured, broken, paralytic, at the crossroads." These brilliant words were spoken by the great Franko 100 years ago. And today, as never before, we feel their relevance. But to understand their full depth, as history shows, we did not have enough time—100 years. Franko spoke them in one night. I guess he talked to God that July night.