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“НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ВЕРЕСЕНЬ 2016 WWW.UNWLA.ORG 9 Homage to Ivan Franko Excerpts from article written by Sophia Sluzar about a commemorative event honoring Ivan Franko hosted by UNWLA Branch 54, which was published in the June 2007 issue of Our Life. The a uthor, who served as Press and Public Relations Chair of Branch 54, passed away in May 2013. The excerpts are reprinted with permission of Maria Pazuniak, current president of Branch 54. Early Life Ivan Franko was born on August 27, 1856, into the family of a relatively well-to-do village black- smith in Nahuevychi, Galicia, then a province in the Habsburg Empire. His education began at a village school and continued at a school run by the Basilian monks in Drohobych. Franko sub- sequently attended the Drohobych gymnasium (secondary academic school) from which he grad- uated in 1875. In his semi-biographical stories and memoirs, Franko painted a rather grim pic- ture of his early school days describing how as a shy and awkward village boy he was harassed by his classmates and some of his teachers. Never- theless, he mastered several languages, including Latin, German, and Polish, and somewhat to his own surprise was consistently the top student in his class. In 1875, Franko enrolled in Lviv Univer- sity where he studied classical philology and Ukrainian language and literature. Franko also joined the editorial board of the student magazine Druh (Companion), where some of his early liter- ary works were published, and embarked on his life-long literary career. Politics Except for brief periods, Franko lived his entire life in Galicia. He saw his environment as a mic- rocosm that illuminated developments in the world at large; as conditions changed for Ukrain- ians in Galicia, Franko’s political and social views also evolved. Two events in particular shaped po- litical conditions for Ukrainians in the Habsburg Empire in Franko’s time: 1) the revolutions of 1848, which ended peasant unpaid labor on land- owner estates but left the peasantry land poor and overtaxed; and 2) the reorganization of the Em- pire in 1867, which conceded de facto administra- tive control of Galicia to the Polish nobility, an event that led to curtailing Ukrainian political representation in the provincial parliament and limiting the use of the Ukrainian language in transactions with the state, in schools, publica- tions, etc. While at Lviv University, Franko met Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841-1895), a historian and civic activist from Kyiv who challenged Fran- ko and his fellow students to concern themselves with the socio-economic problems in Galicia and to shed the clerical influence that prevailed at that time in Galician Ukrainian society. Franko’s pub- lishing and political activities, as well as his asso- ciation with Drahomanov, attracted the attention of the police; he was accused of belonging to a nonexistent socialist organization and of spread- ing socialist propaganda and sentenced to eight months in prison. His prison term did not discourage Franko from continuing his writing and political activities. He helped to organize a workers’ group in Lviv, contributed articles to the Polish-langu- age paper Praca (Labor), and studied the writings of Marx and Engels. In 1880, Franko was again sentenced to a three-month prison term on the charge that he was fomenting agrarian unrest. Released from prison, Franko was placed under police surveillance and forced to leave Lviv Uni- versity, which today is named after him. His contacts with Ukrainians in the Rus- sian Empire led to his third arrest in 1889. After his release, Franko and Mykhailo Pavlyk, who shared his political views, cofounded the Radical Party in 1890 and began publishing the party journal Narod (The People). Three times during the 1890s, Franko ran as the Radical Party’s can- didate for seats in the Vienna and Galician par- liaments; manipulations by local authorities and opposition from more conservative Ukrainian cir- cles thwarted his intentions. In 1899, a crisis oc- curred in the Radical Party and Franko left to join a populist faction in forming National Democratic Party. He remained active in the NDP until 1904, when he withdrew from political life. Franko eventually parted company with Drahomanov’s views on socialism and the idea that Ukrainian national rights could be assured in the framework of a federated Russia. In the intro- duction to his poetry collection Miy Izmarahd (My Emerald, 1898), Franko also rejected Marx- ism, describing it as a “dogma based on hatred and class struggle.”
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