PERSPECTIVES: Franko - an uncommon genius (11/05/06)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Franko - an uncommon genius

Ivan Franko didn't much like Ukrainians. For him, they were people of little character, undisciplined, sentimental and prone to bickering, egoism, two-facedness and pride. He saw few examples in their history of civic spirit, loyalty, justice and freedom.

Ukrainians, on the other hand, really love Franko. They've put him on postage stamps, coins and currency (see Ingert Kuzych's "Focus on Philately," June 6, 2004, and July 4, 2004), named streets, town squares, a cruise ship, opera house, theaters, universities and even an entire city after him. There are monuments to him in Lviv, Kyiv, Brody and my hometown of Cleveland. For good reason.

Born 150 years ago in a remote corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franko had an astonishing career. With an energy and capacity for work that seems superhuman, he created well in excess of a thousand pieces of fiction, poetry, journalism and scholarship, most of them in Ukrainian, but not all. Franko worked in 14 different languages, translating Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Pushkin, Ibsen, Zola, Mickiewicz, Heine, Goethe, Cervantes, etc., not to mention original articles published in 50 different European publications.

I first came across Franko when my mother read "Lys Mykyta" to me when I was a little boy. In retelling the 12th century French folktale of Reynard the Fox, Franko enriched it with Ukrainian folklore and satire, creating one of the most recognized figures in Ukrainian culture: the clever fox who stands alone against all the other animals, shrewdly turning his enemies' weapons against them and winning in the end. I still have my T-shirt from the Lys Mykyta Lounge - "The Sly Fox" - where Cleveland Ukrainians gathered in the 1970s, and remember fondly the satirical magazine Edward Kozak put out from 1947 to 1990, calling it - What else? - Lys Mykyta.

Franko also wrote about a hundred short stories. At the Ridna Shkola Saturday school in the 1960s, we read a couple, including one about a boy who spends a year in school and learns basically nothing: all he knows is how to write the nonsense syllables, "a-baba-halamaha." Today, Ivan Malkovych, responsible for a wonderful series of children's books, calls his Kyiv publishing house - you guessed it - A-ba-ba-ha-la-ma-ha. My wife read those books to our children when they were little.

As a teenager I read "Zakhar Berkut" (1883), a novel about Ukrainians' resistance to the Mongols in 1241. (Recently, our son brought the same novel home from Ridna Shkola, only now in abridged form much like Cliff's Notes.) In all, Franko wrote several dozen novels, including "Boa Constrictor" about the nascent oil industry in Galicia and the birth of working class consciousness. (I read a 1957 English translation of a Russian translation of the original Ukrainian.) Franko wrote another novel on the same topic, "Boryslav is Laughing." A couple of years ago, someone asked me if there's an English translation and I had to tell him, alas, that none exists, as far as I know.

On the other hand, we do have translations of Franko's poetry - many of them on the terrific website http://www.franko.lviv.ua, including love poems, sonnets, revolutionary hymns and his incredible narrative poems. One, "The Death of Cain," describes the biblical murderer and his wanderings and reflections after being expelled from Eden. In another one, the 17th century ascetic Ivan Vyshensky dispatches his "epistles" from Mount Athos, urging his countrymen to struggle for freedom. Franko's masterpiece is "Moses," a personal reflection on the burden of spiritual leadership. Although the poem is about Jews searching for the Promised Land, the allusion to Ukrainians is clear. A century later, composer Myroslav Skoryk debuted his opera based on Franko's work in the very opera house named after its author.

As if novels, short stories, children's books and poetry weren't enough, Franko also wrote several plays, including "Stolen Happiness," about Ukrainian village life. Still in repertory, it became the basis for another opera - this one by Yulia Meytus - as well as a 1952 movie, an Armenian television production and a recent film by Andrii Donchyk.

Franko was also a formidable scholar, publishing around 100 or so sociological, political and historical-economic studies: these include works on the peasant movement, 1848 Revolution in Galicia and Polish-Ukrainian relations; several studies on the Ukrainian language and its dialects; a five-volume collection of texts and analyses of Ukrainian Apocrypha and Legends; literary criticism of modern Ukrainian and European writers; a History of Ukrainian-Ruthenian Literature; a History of the 18th Century Puppet Theater in Ukraine; studies of folk songs; anthropological compilations of clothing, food, art, beliefs and sayings of Galician peasants.

Franko also organized political parties and scholarly organizations, edited newspapers and journals, and taught at the university. In one poem, he exhorts himself to "work, work, work and in working succumb." And that's what happened: when Franko died at age 59, he was utterly exhausted. No wonder: a 50-volume edition of his works, published in the 1970s-1980s, contains only half of what he wrote. Imagine: 50 volumes!

To say Franko didn't like Ukrainians is not the whole story. In his famous poem "Sidohlavomu," he cites why he dislikes his country, only to conclude it's because of his "excessive love" for her. That's why he devoted his life to such a broad array of literary and civic activities - to give his people a culture that social, historical and political circumstances had denied them - something he analyzed, described and worked all his life to remedy.

Presumptuous as it is for me to try to figure out Franko's mind, I'll bet if he saw what his country has achieved since his death in 1916, he'd be delighted by the Declaration of Independence, the Orange Revolution, the tilt toward the Ukrainian language, etc. On the other hand, he probably wouldn't be surprised at Ukrainians' difficulties with governing even as that provides another reason to dislike his countrymen. Maybe their success at this year's World Cup soccer championship would have made up for it. No doubt, he would have enjoyed it just like the rest of us, only by now, he would have written a novel, an epic poem and an analysis of the interplay between sports and politics in Ukrainian history.

Franko was an uncommon genius. What a pleasure to rediscover him on the 150th anniversary of his birth!

Andrew Fedynsky's e-mail address is [email protected].

| Home Page |