A Prophet In His Own Country
The following words are ascribed to Socrates: “The more I know about the world, the more clear it becomes that I know nothing.” This can be attributed to the geniuses of different times and peoples: it is illusory to think we know all or even much about them. In reality, we know almost nothing about them, even if their books are required reading in all the schools and their portraits adorn the national bank notes. For the thoughts of geniuses, as a rule, reach us (if only we want to know about them) by medium of unkind commentators.
This was also the case with Ivan Yakovych Franko, a person whose heritage undoubtedly became the peak of Ukraine’s intellectual life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Soviet ideology treated his memory with marked deference, for it was impossible to silence geniuses of this magnitude. Franko had a different fate: his true views were in fact walled with a thick stone of dogmatic and cynically-simplified interpretations, and flowers — plastic ones — were laid atop his grave.
What was the rank-and-file Ukrainian intellectual supposed to know about Franko in Soviet times (this stereotype sometimes also exists today, which is why we have the right to speak about the unknown Franko)? A revolutionary democrat who favored applying force to destroy the existent system, a follower of the Russian revolutionary democrats Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, he took interest in Marxism and even translated a chapter from Das Kapital, but, in general, he “did not rise”(!) to it. He was, above all, a great master of word, but his political views, although advanced, were not always definitive (they would add in Stalin’s times: “not without a trace of national limitations”).
There is only one way out of this maze of dogmas: to read Franko himself, bearing in mind that he was not only an outstanding writer but also an extremely acute political thinker, philosopher, historian, economist, art connoisseur, and critic. Incidentally, to imagine what kind of work a genius like Franko did, let us only remember this: the 50 volumes of his works published in Kyiv in the 1970s-80s barely embrace half of the total he wrote! In his lifetime, Franko created over 6,000 pieces of fiction and research, or, in other words, a new work would come out every two days until his death. So let us read Franko without recapitulations.
Was he a revolutionary democrat? No doubt, he was a revolutionary in the sphere of the spirit, for he fought all his lifetime against obtuse conservatism, dogmatic prejudices, and deadly stagnation. As to his political views, the situation is far more complicated. He himself wrote about his attitude to Marxism in the foreword to the collected works My Emerald (1898): “I must admit I have never belonged to the followers of that religion and had the audacity, among the sneers and jeers of its adepts, to boldly carry my flag of the old humane socialism based on ethnic and broadly humane upbringing of the popular masses, on the progress stemming from the wide extension of education, science, criticism, and human and national freedom, rather than that based on the despotism of pastors, bureaucratic regimentation of the whole future of people, or the parliamentary skullduggery that is to lead us to that radiant future.”
Incidentally, about the despotism of the pastors: as early as 1903, Franko warned prophetically that the Marxist teaching on the dictatorship of the proletariat, which he categorically objected to, would inevitably lead to such cruel forms of one-man dictatorship that even ancient Oriental tyrannies will look, in comparison, almost like a showpiece of freedom. Ensuing events showed the depth of this intimation.
Franko also differed with Marxists in another point, in his attitude toward the national movement. He never accepted the attempts to regard the national question as something secondary vis-a/-vis the social and class problems: both categories of problems were equally important for him. Franko stressed, “All that goes outside the framework of a nation is either the hypocrisy of people who would like to use international ideals to cover up their striving for the domination of one nation over another, or the morbid sentimentalism of those engaged in fantasy, who would like to cover their spiritual alienation from their own nation with broad and easily accessible phrases” (his article “Beyond the Possible,” 1900).
One more thought in that article sounds very up-to-date against the background of recent statements that the “national idea” has not worked and that we must first revive the economy and feed the people. Consider Franko’s words: “The national-economic problem propels every nation forward, with an iron-like persistence, to want to win political independence, and, failing that, they will only bring this nation the prospect of economic slavery, decline, pauperization, cultural stagnation, and decline.” And those “who put this question so broadly,” who are convinced in the impossibility of an independent Ukraine due to the prevailing “stomach-related” interests, are, as Franko writes with scathing sarcasm, “the advocates of common servile sense.”
Thus as Franko wrote, the intellectual elite of Ukraine faces an urgent task: “To form out of the great ethnic mass of the Ukrainian people a Ukrainian nation, a single cultural mechanism, without which no nation or state, no matter how powerful, can now exist.” To do so, “we must learn to feel ourselves as Ukrainians, not the Galicians or Bukovinians, but Ukrainians without official borders.”
Somebody, reading these lines of the great thinker and writer, will see nationalism. Not really. The soul of a true genius (including Franko) holds no place for the feelings of ethnic hatred. Consider what he wrote in 1905, “We are all Russophiles. We love the great Russian people and wish them all kind of good: we love, learn, and read their language.” When in 1904 publishers of the famous Russian Brockhaus and Ephron Encyclopedia suggested that Franko, as the most outstanding Ukrainian writer of that time, write a series of articles in Russian on the contemporary state and history of Ukrainian literature, he willingly agreed to do so. Ivan Franko was fluent in Polish and German, writing works of fiction and research in these languages. He constantly stressed the necessity to unite the Dnipro Ukrainian and Polish lands of Galicia as well as the dangers of discord between them. Yet, his heart was always, every minute, devoted to his Motherland, Ukraine.
In the year 1898 Franko wrote the article “Something about Myself,” which has inter alia the stunning lines whose passion and confession-style sincerity cannot leave one indifferent: “My Ukrainian patriotism is a heavy yoke fate put on my shoulders. I can startle or quietly curse the fate that put this yoke on my shoulders, but I cannot shake it off, I cannot search for a different fatherland, for in such case I would be a scoundrel in the face of my own conscience. And if anything prompts me to carry this yoke, it is the image of those common Ukrainian people who may be the oppressed, ignorant, and demoralized for so many years, poor and sluggish, but who are gradually awakening and feeling a mass craving for the light, truth and justice, and are looking for the ways to achieve such things. Hence it is worth working for such people, and no honest work will be wasted.”
These were not mere words for him. A titan of the spirit equal to the great figures of the Renaissance, Franko dedicated his life to backbreaking labor for the benefit of his fraternal people. He also tasted prison bars and the exhausting political struggle for a seat in the Austrian parliament; sometimes he had no money to buy bread and had to earn a living by translating and proof-reading other’s works. The best son of his people, who contributed to 50 various European publications and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in the 1910s (the representative of a stateless nation could not obtain it, and the Russian Lev Tolstoi also failed to win it), often wandered the streets of his beloved Lviv totally alone, in worn-out clothes, with the eyes reddened from continuous work, carrying a loaf of bread like a treasure in his hands.
But his spirit was unbreakable to the end. Franko appealed, “We must feel our ideal with our heart and understand it with our mind, we must exert all our strength and means to approach it.” And later, “Thousands of paths, leading to its fruition, run directly beneath our feet, and whether we will follow these paths toward the ideal or veer off to entirely different paths will only depend on our comprehension of this ideal and our readiness to accept it.”
Mikhail Bulgakov said of his beloved Moliere: “Nothing is required for his glory. But we need him for our glory.” The same could be said of Franko. The best we could do for our glory is to live as he, resurrecting, could not repeat his bitter words: “The little tree of our intellectual and political life has proved to be a miserable dwarf covered with scab and fungus.”
