Creator of the nation
In his philosophical and sociopolitical works Ivan Franko raised questions that were topical not only and not so much for that period as for subsequent generations of Ukrainians in whose success and happy destiny he wholeheartedly believed. Franko’s grandeur as a thinker and sociopolitical activist lay in his ability to single out from among the countless aspects of Ukrainian public life those that would be of decisive importance to the Ukrainian nation, and to propose realistic ways of resolving them.
One of the problems that always troubled Franko was the Ukrainian nation’s lack of unity — not so much in geopolitical terms as in ideology and approaches to basic cultural and spiritual principles. This theme is a dominant leitmotif in his poem “Moses.” Is this issue not topical today, when politicians, in order to carry out their tactical tasks, increasingly often seek to divide the Ukrainian nation into “two Ukraines,” regardless of strategic prospects and the harm that will be done to future generations, who will have to expend much effort to surmount these mostly artificial barriers?
Thus, it is important to analyze Franko’s role in establishing relations between Galicia and Dnipro Ukraine in the last third of the 19 th century and reveal his views on the problem of Ukrainian national unity, and the formation and consolidation of the modern Ukrainian nation.
In order to understand Franko’s role in the development of relations between Galicia and Dnipro Ukraine in the second half of the 19th century, as well as unifying efforts in his time, it would be useful to analyze the state of these relations in the mid-1870s. After Panteleimon Kulish withdrew from political activity, Mykola Drahomanov became the main intermediary between Galicia and Dnipro Ukraine from 1873. He quickly impressed the young narodovtsi (national populists); one of them, Volodymyr Navrotsky, pointed out that “Drahomanov was indeed born to awaken us to work for the good of the people.”
Yet, from the very outset there was a tendency toward conflict with the “senior” leadership of the Narodnyk movement, which was rooted in its unwillingness to publish intact all the radical articles submitted by Drahomanov and the younger members of the pro-people’s movement. There were several unsuccessful attempts to reach an understanding, and the process of establishing the Taras Shevchenko Literary Society exacerbated their relations. The eastern Ukrainians, who had mostly financed the undertaking, viewed this society as an all-Ukrainian institution focusing on scholarly literary activities, with an emphasis on Ukrainian folkways; they also envisaged simplified membership procedures for every Ukrainian. Yet the final version of the statute, prepared by the Lviv-based narodovtsi, differed essentially from previous agreements. It significantly limited the enlistment of members, and the board became the authorized head of the society, which Drahomanov correctly described as an “oligarchy.”
On their part, the narodovtsi objected to the Dnipro Ukrainians’ neglect of the national cause and their active promotion of socialism, including in Galicia. Different approaches to recognizing the priorities of national and social factors exacerbated relations between Drahomanov and the younger populists, including Meliton Buchynsky, Volodymyr Navrotsky, and Yevhen Zhelekhivsky. At the turn of 1874-75, most of them stopped corresponding with each other. A rift finally occurred during Drahomanov’s visit to Lviv in the fall of 1875, when he was en route to Russia. Addressing a popular assembly in Lviv, he said that he “does not see a Ukrainian nationality” and confirmed his authorship of the article in which he stated that the Ukrainian and Russian peoples had the “same ethnic and religious roots.” The narodovtsi could not accept his theory of Russian, Great Russian, and Ukrainian literatures, and his comparison of Ukrainian literature with Provencal or Plattdeutsch (Low German).
In the late 1870s relations between Galicia and Dnipro Ukraine were on the verge of collapse; the Dnipro Ukrainians had rejected the idea of establishing a center in Lviv. Drahomanov later recalled that the Kyiv-based leadership had resolved to fine anyone who even broached the question of consolidation with Galicia. It was only Franko’s dedicated position on unity and Drahomanov’s role as an indefatigable “awakener of souls” that prevented the breakdown of all ties between the Ukrainian territories under Austrian and Russian rule. Starting in the late 1870s, the two men were the key intermediaries in relations between Galicia and Dnipro Ukraine, determining their character and structure.
The young Franko attracted the attention of both local Galician and Kyiv-based activists by his first newspaper articles and stories published in Druzi (Friends), their clarity and powerful eloquence attesting to the young writer’s talent. Unlike the narodovtsi, Franko was an ardent adherent of the socialist idea, especially in Drahomanov’s interpretation, which also helped Franko establish close contacts with the Kyiv Hromada. By the mid-1880s, all contacts between the Kyiv Hromada and Galicia were restricted to Franko and his circle of fellow thinkers (Mykhailo Pavlyk, Ivan Belei) who were captivated by the new European ideas and had embarked on a radical trend of the social movement in Galicia that was expressly unifying from the outset.
In contrast to the narodovtsi who, beginning in 1880, curtailed their activity and became markedly less adamant about advancing the idea of unity in order to become a mass movement and attract the largest possible number of supporters (among other things, they abandoned phonetics so as to attract readers to their publications and focused mainly on Galician problems), the radical youth led by Franko brooked no compromise in their publishing endeavors. During that critical period of national unification efforts, their journal Svit (The World) was the only one that sought to represent universal Ukrainian interests in Galicia. Evidence of this effort is found Oleksandr Konysky’s correspondence with his editor I. Belei in 1881. Franko gave significant assistance to the journal, becoming in effect its main contributor.
Svit became a platform for the leading writers of Galicia and Dnipro Ukraine — not just socialists. Franko himself emphasized this fact in 1910, noting that “for the first time Galicians, Russian Ukrainians, and Ukrainian emigres encountered each other on the foundation of progressive ideas on its pages: Drahomanov, Vovk, on one side, and Konysky, Nechui-Levytsky, Lymansky, and Hrinchenko, on the other. This was the first attempt at a compromise between the progressive and radical elements of all Ukraine-Rus’.”
However, this attempt also laid bare the problems of unifying all Ukrainian forces of unification. The emigres, Drahomanov in particular, became disillusioned about collaborating with the journal because it published articles written by people from Dnipro Ukraine, whose views they did not share. Franko succeeded in founding a genuine all-Ukrainian journal only in 1898, when the Literaturno-naukovyi visnyk (Literary-Scientific Herald) first appeared, with Svit as its foundation and predecessor.
In the mid-1880s, after its fascination with socialism waned, the Kyiv Hromada expanded its contacts with Ukrainophile figures in Galicia and members of the Narodna Volia movement, including Oleksandr Barvinsky. In 1882, Barvinsky had called for severing all contacts with the old Rusyns and for a clear designation of the populist movement’s positions on unity. However, most narodovtsi opposed him. From the mid-1880s, he and his fellow thinkers (known as the “principalists”) were actively supported by leading activists in Dnipro Ukraine and their contacts intensified. In fact, two main lines of cooperation between the Ukrainophiles of Galicia and Dnipro Ukraine took shape in this period:
1. Franko-Drahomanov (Ukrainophiles, mostly pro-socialist, from Dnipro Ukraine);
2. Barvinsky-Konysky (Kyiv Hromada, mostly of a liberal, national-democratic orientation).
In 1884-1885, the activists from Dnipro Ukraine sought to reconcile the radicals (primarily Franko) with the narodovtsi group in order to strengthen the Ukrainian movement in Galicia and its unifying character. After lengthy talks and arguments, a compromise was achieved in the summer of 1885 through the direct efforts of Konysky. During a meeting of narodovtsi, convened by Yulian Romanchuk, most of the participants, except for Mykhailo Podolynsky and Anatol Vakhnianyn, spoke out in favor of reforming Zoria, as did Franko.
In the 1880s, Franko’s world outlook fundamentally changed as a result of his collaboration with Drahomanov, the narodovtsi, and the Polish left-wing movement. Already by the 1870s, Franko had defined himself as a naive, “sympathizing” socialist, but after the trial of 1878 he made a careful study of the theory of socialism. He noted later that young Galicians were “impressed [by socialism] through its knowledge of the future, simplicity of its attitude and way of resolving the most complex problems, the dogmatic nature of its theses, its seemingly scholarly phraseology, and also by what the late Drahomanov had identified as ‘Jewish self-aggrandizement’ among the German social democrats.”
During this period Franko’s correspondence with Drahomanov and his theory of “community” exerted a major influence on the Galician writer’s world view. As Yaroslav Hrytsak aptly puts it, Franko’s world view at the turn of the 1880s could be described as a structure, with bricks borrowed from other theories. Franko, however, was never a conformist and did not blindly accept other peoples’ views and doctrines. Having analyzed the works of Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, and other socialist theoreticians, he quickly grasped the shortcomings of socialist teachings, especially the Marxian version, and its inappropriateness for Galician realities and the peasant character of the Ukrainian nation. Franko’s disillusionment with the socialist movement mounted after his futile attempts at cooperation with Polish socialists, who clearly displayed their chauvinistic nature and disregard for Ukrainian national problems in favor of restoring their “historical Poland.”
The conflict with Polish socialists on national grounds demonstrated the extraordinary significance of Franko’s idea of Ukrainian unity. His well-known poetic cycle entitled “Ukraina” appeared in the early 1880s h(never published in either the 20 and 50-volume collections of Franko’s works. The most famous of these poems, “Ne pora” (It Is Time, It Is Time, It Is Time) became one of Ukraine’s national anthems. In it the poet clearly articulates his stand:
“It is time, it is time, it is time/To refuse to serve Russian and Pole!/ For an end is at hand to the past and its crime;/Our Ukraine claims your life and your soul.” The use of the concluding term “Ukraine” is significant, although at the time all Ukrainian territories in Galicia were usually referred to as “Rus’-Ukraine,” which also attests to Franko’s departure from the Galician tradition and switch to Ukrainian unity positions.
Later, in his article “Beyond the Range of the Possible” (1900), Franko noted: “Everything that goes beyond the framework of the nation is either hypocrisy on the part of people who are ready to conceal their strivings for the supremacy of one nation over another behind international ideals, or the sickly sentimentalism of dreamers, who are ready and willing to conceal their spiritual alienation from their own nation behind wide-ranging ‘universal’ phrases.”
Summing up his involvement in the socialist movement, especially in regard to his collaboration with Polish socialists, Franko wrote: “...in international issues, like socialism, healthy organic shoots can grow in every land only in unmistakably national soil, and only then will they cease to be theory and become a blossoming reality.” Clearly, these ideas formed the basis of the evolution of his ideas in the 1880s and 1890s from championing socialism to national democracy. (In 1899 he was one of the founders of the Ukrainian National Democratic Party, and in a series of newspaper articles he emphasized that the creation of a nation-state is an unconditional prerequisite for resolving the social question.)
In conclusion, I will allow myself to paraphrase Franko’s statement from his “Open Letter to Galician Ukrainian Youth”: Today, we must learn to perceive ourselves as Ukrainians — not as easterners, westerners, or southerners — but as Ukrainians without ideological and spiritual borders. I trust that 15 years from now we will not have to seek Franko’s advice on solving problems relating to Ukrainian national unity.
