In this long-awaited and brilliant book, Yaroslav Hrytsak, a leading Ukrainian historian who is also well known in the West, presents the first half of his biography of Ivan Franko (1856-1916). A great writer, social scientist, and prominent civic figure in the western Ukrainian region of Galicia, which became a stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism during his lifetime, Franko is considered one of modern Ukraine’s “founding fathers.” To offer a fresh reading of his life is a challenge because for a century Ukrainian schoolchildren have been memorizing – depending on the time and place where they went to school – one of two dominant interpretations: Franko the great socialist and revolutionary poet, or Franko the great patriot and nation builder. But Hrytsak rises to the occasion. In order to deconstruct the familiar grand narratives and recover the complexities of nineteenth-century political imagination, he turns to micro-history.
The phrase “his community” in the book’s title could also read “his communities,” since Hrytsak carefully examines the numerous micro-contexts of Franko’s life and work: his native village, his school, the student circles of which he was a member, the readers of his works, the journals he edited, the industrial city of Boryslav as a setting for his socialist propaganda and literary works, the women in his life, etc. While refusing to see Franko’s life as part of some Ukrainian grand narrative – whether socialist or nationalist – the author puts each of his micro-historical studies into the broad European comparative framework. Comparative and conceptual angles come naturally to Hrytsak’s narrative because the author reads widely in German and English. Thus, the vignette chapters of this biography begin with solid historical introductions on the Austrian crown land of Galicia, the notions of time in traditional and modern societies, the concepts of local and national Motherland, the birth of mass literature, the formation of the working class in Eastern Europe, anti-Semitic motifs in nineteenth-century socialism, and so on.
It is fascinating to watch how Hrytsak deconstructs the received wisdom to recover the pre-national, traditional, and ambiguous identity concepts of the poet’s youth. Every educated Ukrainian knows that Franko (stress on the last syllable) was born in 1856 in the village of Nahuievychi into a Ukrainian peasant family. Hrytsak explains, however, that a contemporary peasant would say that Franko (with the “a” stressed) was born in the suburb of Viitivska Hora “after the hungry years,” his parents being a well-to-do blacksmith of German background and a Polish gentry woman, who spoke Ruthenian (Ukrainian) at home. The image of a peasant poet, the Ukrainian national identity, and the Ukrainian-sounding emphasis in his name are all conscious identity choices that Franko made later in his life. These choices were not predetermined either. As Hrytsak shows, at the age of twenty Franko was for a time close to conservative Russophile circles and signed his name Russian-style in the minutes of the Lviv Academic Circle as “Ivan Yakovlevich” (P. 159). He also dreamt of becoming a fashionable salon writer for Ruthenian clerical and intelligentsia readers while securing a steady income as a high school teacher (P. 188).
Franko became the social and national activist we now “know” only after a series of events in 1876-1878, which changed his life and life plans. A meeting with Mykhailo Drahomanov, a socialist thinker and Ukrainian activist from the Russian Empire, Franko’s subsequent arrest and trial for his participation in a socialist conspiracy, and the resulting restriction of traditional career choices liberated Franko from the conventions of polite society. Not yet a socialist when he stood trial for socialist propaganda in 1877-1878, Franko later became a leading leftist voice among Ukrainians in Galicia. In the famous “Boryslav cycle” of short novels, he not so much describes as invents new character types in Ukrainian literature, including that of a worker activist. As Hrytsak shows, the writer’s imagination ran ahead of the times – the workers’ strike at the Boryslav oil fields depicted in Boryslav Is Laughing actually happened twenty years after the novel’s publication.
As a socialist thinker and writer in multicultural Galicia, Franko, in theory, aspired to create an international community of Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish workers in the province. Yet, like most Eastern European socialists of his generation, he blamed popular anti-Semitism on Jewish capital and exploitation, combining the progressive recognition of the Jews as a separate nation entitled to its state with troubling suggestions to limit the economic and political rights of Galician Jews. In 1883-1884, Franko also published an openly anti-Semitic article suggesting that the Jews had provoked the pogroms to benefit from the subsequent financial aid, as well as an unsavory satirical poem about the adventures of the Jew Schwindeles Parchenblьt, or “Dirty Swindler” (Pp. 352-354). Some contemporaries refused to believe that he was indeed the author of the former. Yet Hrytsak carefully reconstructs Franko’s path from the defense of the poor in general to the development of national lenses through which even Jewish workers appeared as the enemy of the indigenous toiling classes. Interestingly, Franko’s anti-Semitism with its “socialist” undertones all but disappeared during his later years, when he became more of a Ukrainian nationalist.
Franko’s marriage in 1883 to Olha Khorunzhynska is another example of the writer consciously constructing his identity. He was among the first Galician intellectuals to act on their assumption that Ruthenians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Little Russians in the Russian Empire constituted a single Ukrainian nationality. Determined to marry an educated Ukrainian woman from across the border, one with progressive social views, Franko concluded a highly symbolic “national marriage” without love, thus dooming himself and his wife to decades of misery. One factor that added to the family’s difficulties was the constant lack of money. The first Ukrainian intellectual in Galicia to make his living as a writer and editor, Franko in fact survived only because for decades he also collaborated with Polish journals, which had a much larger readership. But historically more important was his work for the Ukrainian press, where subscription numbers at the time were usually under 1,500. The print run of Franko’s most popular poetry collection in Ukrainian was actually only between 600 and 1,000 (P. 372). For this relatively small group of readers, by the early 1880s Franko had already become a Ukrainian “Moses,” a cult figure much like the poet Taras Shevchenko had been for Ukrainians in the Russian Empire.
Ultimately, Franko immortalized his name early on by creating in his novels, poems, and scholarly texts a new and very modern Ukraine – a land of industry, worker activists, liberated women, and socialist intellectuals. In other words, in his scholarly and literary works Franko created a social and cultural space for a new generation of patriots to inhabit. In the process, he also proved that these modern realities could be described in the Ukrainian language, no longer just a peasant vernacular. Hrytsak argues, in contrast to much of the previous scholarship, that it was the radical political culture (identified primarily with Franko) rather than the cumulative result of the Ukrainian national movement that caused the final transition from pre-national Ruthenian to a modern, national Ukrainian identity in Galicia (P. 435).
Based on more than a decade of painstaking research, Hrytsak’s book stands out among other recent works by Ukrainian historians for its conceptual vigor, impressive erudition, and beautiful writing style. Ukrainian research centers in North America would do a great favor to the profession by publishing an English translation of this work.