In the 1870s and 1880s Eastern Galician society found itself facing the challenge of modernization. Its Austrian rulers had transferred power to the Polish upper class in 1867, which prepared the ground for a Polonization in the next decade of the city of Lviv, its university, and all major towns. Suddenly Galicia was transformed from a dull, German-speaking backwater into a center of Polish culture – one that Polish activists hoped to use as a staging ground for the revival of the recovery of statehood. Across the border with the Russian empire, the repression of Ukrainian activities in the sixties and seventies included the banning of almost all education and almost all publications in Ukrainian, brought “Eastern” Ukrainian activists to Lviv, and stimulated the development of a press that would also serve fellow-Ukrainians in the Russian empire. Galicia therefore became a Piedmont for both the Polish and Ukrainian national movements. Hrytsak argues that in this radically transformed situation the Ukrainian population of Eastern Galicia was faced with a stark choice: modernize or die. The young generation of radicals rose to the challenge by developing a literature – in fact an entire journalistic, political and scholarly discourse – that created a strong Ukrainian national movement. They did so by linking national and social issues, thus broadening the movement’s appeal. In these years they also won a decisive victory over the conservative, religiously-based, traditionalist Russophile camp. Within twenty years a radical, modern political and literary culture appeared in Western Ukraine – one that borrowed from Western Europe. And in the years that followed this Ukrainian identity was broadly adopted by the masses.
The key figure in this remarkable transformation was Ivan Franko. He became the recognized leader of the radicals, producing a steady stream of journalistic and scholarly articles, as well as literary works in Ukrainian, Polish and German. Hrytsak’s account only tells the story up to 1886. It is essentially the story of the writer’s youth and the first part of his productive life. Throughout the account Hrytsak tries to problematize the discussion of nationalism’s roots in this part of Europe, and to challenge some stereotypical views concerning Franko’s biography. The problematization begins with the discussion of the rural-urban divide: many “villages” could easily be described as towns in terms of the size and nature of their populations; and many large towns retained a rural character and maintained close contact with the countryside. The sociological milieu from which Franko, and many similar activists, emerged should therefore not too quickly be defined as peasant or rural, as is often done. Hrytsak overturns many widely-held misconceptions concerning Franko’s beliefs, describing with considerable relish Franko’s socialism, atheism, and defense of free love, all of which have been avoided or denied by both Soviet and nationalist biographers and critics. Franko gradually deemphasized his socialism as he came to recognize the importance of working within the national movement, which meant linking the concerns of the intelligentsia to those of the countryside where the majority of Eastern Galicia’s Ukrainians were to be found. His genius lay in an ability to articulate the drive for modernity while retaining a firm understanding of the traditional mentality, and to draw his readers into a new world. Out of Franko’s work a new conception of Ukraine emerges, one populated by nationally aware peasants, intellectuals, women and workers. He produced a literature in vernacular Ukrainian that demonstrated the viability and conveyed the attractiveness of a modern, forward-looking identity.
Hrytsak’s book is therefore both a biography and a history of one nationalism’s evolution over two crucial decades. The book is organized around contexts: Franko and the ideological struggles of the day, the peasantry, the town of Boryslav during the oil boom in the 1880s, the writer and his women, his Jews, and his readers. Each context provides a fresh insight into the man and his time. The chapter on women, for example, presents a fascinating, “de-beatified” (as he puts it) account of the writer’s main relationships (in all, eleven are known). These are described in terms of Franko’s personal psychology and of societal expectations. Hrytsak speculates that the writer’s loss early in his life of those closest to him subconsciously confirmed in his mind the relationship between love and death. As a result his avoidance of close emotional contact became a defense mechanism. Hrytsak describes the writer’s difficulty in finding a partner. Attempts to reconcile sexual attraction with political correctness were mostly unsuccessful. Eventually Franko married a woman from “Eastern Ukraine,” because it was a contribution to the unification of the two parts of Ukraine. There is rich material here for a deeper analysis that future investigators will have to pursue. Hrytsak also offers insights into Franko’s radical view of the institution of marriage, concluding sardonically that “not a single biography tells us of Franko’s role in promoting new forms of marriage and sexual relations” (P. 331). The chapter on the Jews presents the most nuanced account to date of Franko’s views. It rejects any simplified idea of him as either an antisemite or philosemite, but explains how his attitudes were defined by a continual reassessment of both Ukrainian and Jewish identities within the sphere of socialist and nationalist politics. In his youth Franko accepted the opinion, typical among leading socialists, that Jews generally played a harmful role as rapacious exploiters in the capitalist economy. However, he continually made a distinction between rich and poor Jews, exploiters and workers. Later, as he began to grapple with the complexity of the issues faced by the Jewish population, he not only accepted the fact that Jews were a nation (and not merely a religion), but also began to view their struggle for self-definition and cultural autonomy in a favorable light. Hrytsak analyses Franko’s most important journalistic and literary texts that deal with Jewish issues – many of which, he points out, were never republished during Soviet times – and he compares these texts with the writings of Jewish, Polish, German, Czech, and other Ukrainian contemporaries. As a result, a rich interpretive framework emerges with indications of where further analysis is required.
Perhaps most shocking for Ukrainian readers is Hrytsak’s assertion that Franko was, in the first part of his life, unsure of his Ukrainianness, and that even after his “conversion” he refused to denounce other “isms” in the name of nationalism. Although the writer is now an icon of the national movement, Hrytsak warns readers that they should avoid the teleological temptation, otherwise they will be incapable of understanding how Franko’s work could project the idea of a modern identity that simultaneously combined Ukrainianness with socialism, feminism, atheism, and modernized Jewishness. This biography, Hrytsak tells us, “takes another tack: wherever possible it is written as though Franko suddenly ceased to exist on his thirtieth birthday and what happened to him later is not known” (P. 14). Readers must struggle with the formative period, and not fall back on the reassuring settled image.
The account allows for some irritating repetition, as when the same quotation recurrs in different contexts, but the writing is always lucid and fluent, and often entertaining. Although it is the product of considerable scholarship (the author is a leading historian in contemporary Ukraine, and worked on the book for sixteen years), the style is designed to appeal to a non-specialist audience. The book is enhanced by a number of illustrations and cartoons from the period under discussion, and contains tables that provide information on the ethnic and religious composition of the population, literacy levels, favorite authors, and other statistical data. The extensive bibliography also includes references to key archival sources. This volume is now clearly the standard work on Franko – but more than that, it provides a wealth of insights into the roots of a nineteenth-century national movement that helped to define today’s Eastern Europe.