German Epistolary Heritage Of Ivan Franko And Its Dominant Features

Abstract

The epistolary heritage of Ivan Franko contains over six thousand letters. Germanepistolary correspondence addressed to Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Heidelberg, Freiburg, Stanislav,Chernivtsi. The author of the article analyzes also the response letters sent to I. Franko. His firstletters in German were addressed to Olha Roshkevych. They were written under the strongimpression that the epistolary novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” by J.W. von Goethe had hadon I. Franko. The Ukrainian writer’s correspondence with H. Kanner and I. Singer the editors of theweekly newspaper “Zeit” is an evidence of their close cooperation. I. Franko had close professionalties with V. Adler one of the founders and leaders of the Austrian social-democratic party, theeditor of Vienna newspaper “Arbeiterzeitung”, as well as with V. Adler’s wife Emma. I. Franko’scorrespondence with a prominent Slavic scholar V. Yagic didn’t contain only private mattersdiscussions. The third part of it is totally scientific which actually makes it valuable for researchers.I. Franko’s epistolary works reflect his artistic writer’s style neither in form nor in content. Hisletters are characterized by the depth of his thought, consistency of his statements, clearness of thesentence constructions, tendency to critical assessments of phenomena and scientific findings.