Franko's sesquicentennial marked at Shevchenko Society (09/24/06)

Franko's sesquicentennial marked at Shevchenko Society

NEW YORK - The scholarly conference honoring the 150th anniversary of Ivan Franko's birth took place on September 9 at the New York headquarters of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (known by its Ukrainian acronym, NTSh). On this first gathering after the summer break, the society's conference room was overflowing with attendees.

Presentations were given by the following literary experts: Dr. Leonid Rudnytzky ("Ivan Franko: in Search of the Ukrainian 'I'"), Dr. Larissa Onyshkevych ("Viewing Franko as a Literary Theoretician and Practitioner: Using One Literary Work as an Example"), and Dr. Bohdan Rubchak ("The Curse of a Touch"). Dr. Vasyl Makhno led the conference, and Dr. Orest Popovych, NTSh president, opened the new academic season.

In his remarks, Dr. Popovych emphasized Ivan Franko's involvement in the founding and activities of the NTSh, and noted his energetic organizational work at the society as well as his participation in the editing of the first editions of Literary-Scientific News. At the same time, the speaker pointed out Franko's spiritual and moral influence on future political and cultural developments in Ukraine in the 20th century, in spite of constant battles with poor health and personal problems.

It was sad to hear how unappreciated Franko was by NTSh members during his life, how Halychyna's society of the day was sometimes hostile to this uncommon, controversial personality. There is even a story about how Franko, dejected by many undeserved hurts, threatened to emigrate to the United States in order to put an end to such denigration. Luckily, this did not happen, said Dr. Popovych.

But today we have the responsibility to atone for this guilt, Dr. Popovych said, if only by such prosaic means as financing the most recent publication of the NTSh Notes. The anniversary volume of this newly released publication is fully dedicated to Franko studies.

"In addition to writers of national dimensions, in national literatures there also are spiritual prophets, whose work outgrows the boundaries of their nation and creates a powerful synthesis of eternal values of the human spirit," Dr. Rudnytzky said in his presentation. Developing this thesis, he referred to the most expressive examples of Franko's poetry: "Moisei" and "Kameniari." Commenting on the poet's well-known emotional pronouncements on the theme "I don't love Ukraine!" the speaker caught his listerners' attention by saying that this kind of a glaring logical paradox was precisely the motivation behind the poet's fighting spirit and faith in the power and invincibility of the Ukrainian national existence.

The universality of Franko's creative work, Dr. Rudnytzky said, is based on his deep faith and the conviction that the Ukrainian person will conquer the wall of nationalistic narrow-mindedness, realize the formation of the nation and round out the nation's strivings toward Europe with real values.

Dr. Onyshkevych analyzed one of the early dramatic works by Franko, "Sviatoslav's Dream," written in 1895. This play is about the Princely period in Ukrainian history. The speaker highlighted philosophical and psychological aspects of the dramatic poem,

Freud's and Jung's interpretation of dreams and the collective subconscious, and their influence on the creative process. It is clear why dreams - as the realization of suppressed wishes - could provide material for poetic creativity.

Freud wrote about free association of ideas, when the brain's control center is inactive, while Franko incorporated the association of his ideas into the process of creating poetry. In Dr. Onyshkevych's opinion, "Sviatoslav's Dream" is one of the examples of how the writer applied new ideas on the role of psychoanalysis and the subconscious in creativity, which Franko elaborated on in his work "On the Secrets of Poetic Creativity."

To conclude, Dr. Onyshkevych noted that it is necessary to go back to Franko's original language in subsequent academic publications, as the 50-volume set contains inadmissible editing mistakes.

In his presentation titled "The Curse of the Touch," Dr. Rubchak highlighted Franko's visual depictions and elements of the subconscious in the writer's intricate reconstruction of human existence and its tragedy. The speaker said he believes that the beautiful and the grotesque repeatedly appear as companions in Franko's work. Here Franko went beyond other romantic poets, and his being is saturated with confrontations and conflicts.

Possibly Franko borrowed from Baudelaire the idea that, in literature and art, everything can be used as a subject, that there is nothing that cannot be described or felt in a literary work. Ergo, Franko's naturalistic depictions of prisoners' conditions and necrophiliac motives in childhood and love, the painful details of a hungry childhood, and neurotic phobias of "Boa Constrictor's" hero. Key words and phrases, such as "stifling heat," "disgust," "slime," "snail," "cholera," "obscenity," "skull," are the best examples of the demonic powers that visit Halychyna's primitive mines and the Boryslav ghetto.

Dr. Rubchak said he believes that Franko, the prose-writer and the playwright, was a creator and follower of the literary fashions of his time. Without a doubt, his texts interact with Zola and Dostoyevsky - European modernism. Because of this, the emergence of Franko on the Ukrainian and European cultural scene requires new research based on the broader context of his time.

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