LVIV, Ukraine – If one didn’t know where to look for it, a person could easily miss a simple dwelling that served for nearly 15 years as home to Ivan Franko - one of Ukraine’s most important writers and political thinkers.
Perched at the edge of a busy, winding cobblestone road, this modest home in Lviv houses many items that Franko used.
Among them are solid wooden desks decorated with leafy motifs, delicate quill pens and a net used for catching fish, which the author wove himself.
Yet perhaps the most outstanding feature of the home is its quietness. It is here where Franko found the peace he needed to continue to write and reflect on a substantial life that had sometimes pitted him against the lethargy of his own people.
Ukrainians will commemorate the 95th anniversary of Franko’s death on May 28.
Roman Horak, who along with another writer won this year’s prestigious Shevchenko Award for a 10-volume work on the author’s life, said Franko’s countrymen have yet to grasp his significance.
“If Taras Shevchenko was the person who raised Ukrainians from their eternal sleep…Ivan Franko was the father of Ukrainian statehood,” said Horak, who is also a director of the Franko Memorial Museum, which is located in the author’s home. “He was the founder of the [idea] that people should feel they are owners of their nation.”
Franko was born in 1856 in the village of Naguievychi, outside Drohobych, where he attended school.
He studied Ukrainian language and literature at Lviv University and published his first literary works in the student magazine “Druh.”
The writer was arrested in 1877, which would be the first of several detentions, along with other writers, for spreading socialist propaganda.
He spent eight months in prison, and upon his release, returned to his previous political and publishing activities.
Franko made his living primarily as a journalist.
He was the founder of “Svit,” an 1881 publication, in which he wrote over half of the material, excluding unsigned editorials.
When that publication closed, he moved to “Dilo,” the paper that would eventually become the leading voice for Ukrainians in the territory that makes up contemporary western Ukraine.
When other foreign publications wanted analyses of what was happening in the region, they turned to Franko.
Franko was pushed out of the paper because of his political viewpoints. He had little patience for his era’s ruling elite; political activism was in his blood.
Ivan Franko Museum’s curators clean the writer’s monument in his native village Naguevichi in Lviv Oblast. (UNIAN)
He shared a long-time relationship with Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Drahomanov – the two would co-found a radical political party in 1889 that never won an election.
He later, however, considered his radical socialist views a youthful dalliance and became a firm anti-Marxist.
Franko moved so many times in the early years that the man who transported his belongings said he couldn’t wait until the author moved into his own home.
That desire was fulfilled in 1902, when students and political activists purchased the home for him because he lacked the finances.
By the time Franko moved into the abode, he had already written some of his most seminal works – the historical novel “Zakhar Berkut,” the play “Ukradene Shchastiya,” and the beloved children’s story “Lys Mykyta.” His greatest poem “Moisey” was penned here in 1905.
Throughout the course of his life, Franko wrote more than 6,000 works, translated numerous texts by leading writers, including Goethe and Shakespeare.
Franko’s health began to deteriorate in 1909, but that did not stop his political activities. He was neighbors with the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, whose home he visited frequently.
The two were closely involved in the Shevchenko Scientific Society, which was devoted to the promotion of Ukrainian language literature.
Through his and Hrushevsky’s efforts, by the eve of World War I, the society became analogous to an academy of sciences.
Franko, who had four children, died in poverty 95 years ago but his poems and novels still resonate as if they were written today.
Ivan Franko Memorial Museum
150-152, Ivana Franka St., Lviv
Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily except for Tuesday. Entrance: Hr 5
The National Museum of Literature
11 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho St., Kyiv
It has a few original works by Ival Franko on display.
Kyiv Post staff writer Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at [email protected].
