Пророк у своїй вітчизні: Франко та його спільнота (1856–1886) по Ярослав Грицак (review)

Abstract

449 Ab Imperio, 3/2007 Serhy YEKELCHYK Ярослав Грицак. Пророк у своїй вітчизні: Франко та його спільнота(1856-1886).Київ:“Кри- тика”, 2006. 631 с., илл. Покажчик имен, Покажчик географичнiх назв, Покажчик продовжуваних видань, альманахiв, установ та органiзацiй. ISBN: 966-7679-96-9. 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 450 Рецензии/Reviews narrative because the author reads widely in German and English. Thus, the vignette chapters of this biography begin with solid historical introductions on theAustrian 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 wellto -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 18761878 , 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 18771878 , 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...