In search of the truth

Ukrainians recently marked the 150 th anniversary of Ivan Franko’s birth. Various fine words were spoken about the grandeur of our national genius and the importance of his contributions to our country. But we are left with an uneasy feeling. We should break with the deep-seated tradition of celebrating the jubilee of prominent figures and then promptly forgetting about them. This must not happen to Ivan Franko, all the more so as he remains unread, in spite of all the exalted epithets that we direct at him.

The Day is offering its readers two post-anniversary articles that focus on certain vital aspects of Franko as a cultural historian, literary scholar, and political thinker, who spearheaded the Ukrainian civic movement.

Most Ukrainians regard Franko primarily as a writer, journalist, and public figure. At the same time, his scholarly pursuits are often ignored, even though this holder of a doctorate from the University of Vienna left an enduring legacy of publications on the history of literature, folklore, artistic psychology, etc. Naturally, over the course of time some of his studies have lost their academic value. Nevertheless, many have retained their importance to the present day.

As far as Franko’s scholarly interests in the history of literature are concerned, he was primarily fascinated by the works of Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Vyshensky. Initially, he wanted to write a doctoral thesis on Shevchenko’s political poetry (1844-1847). However, this topic was too radical for the times, so Franko dropped the idea. He then planned to write a dissertation on the creative legacy of Ivan Vyshensky in whom Ukrainian scholars were becoming more interested. Although Franko wrote an undeniably valuable dissertation, he never succeeded in defending it at Lviv University. He had to go to Vienna to defend a different dissertation on the literary history of the old Christian theological novel Barlaam and Josaphat.

Franko published the monograph Ivan Vyshensky and his Works as well as a number of scholarly and semi-popular articles devoted to this writer and the polemical literature of the late 16th-early 17th-century. During his work on the Vyshensky dissertation, Franko could not avoid examining the history of Ostroh and its famous academy, for Vyshensky had often visited that city, where only one of his works was published in his lifetime. It was in this city that the polemicist wrote a letter to Prince Vasyl Kostiantyn Ostrozky.

During his research on Vyshensky, Franko became interested in the cultural center based in Ostroh. In the article “Ioann Vyshensky,” published in Russian in the journal Kievskaia starina [Kyivan Antiquity], Franko says that, judging by the letter to Ostrozky, Vyshensky spent time in Ostroh. In particular, he was indignant at the local folk custom of placing pies and eggs on gravestones. In another semi-popular article first published in the Kolomyia-based journal Khliborob (The Farmer) under the title “Ivan Vyshensky, a 16th-Century Ruthenian Writer,” Franko devoted more attention to the Ostroh cultural center, especially the academy whose founding he attributed to Catholic expansion in the Ukrainian lands.

According to Franko, Prince Ostrozky “understood that Rus’ could not rise from the decline and Orthodoxy could not resist the onslaught of the Latin church without enlightenment. So he founded, at great expense, a higher school or, as it was called at the time, academy in his town of Ostroh and invited the famous Greek scholar Cyril Lukaris, later Patriarch of Constantinople, to head it. Apart from him, that school also employed as teachers such clever and learned Ruthenians as Herasym Smotrytsky, father of the famous Meletii Smotrytsky, and the Galician Ivan Kniahynytsky, later the monk Job, the founder of Skyt Maniavsky Monastery. In addition to the school, Prince Ostrozky established a printing shop in Ostroh, where he published some very good books on public education and in defense of Orthodoxy.”

In this work Franko made ample use of existing information on Ostroh Academy. It is entirely correct to state that the academy emerged as the result of an interdenominational conflict and to interpret its activities in this context. Franko examines the publications of the Ostroh printing shop, especially the Bible. Franko then repeats himself, saying that Prince Ostrozky “founded in his town of Ostroh the first Ruthenian academy (c. 1577), where young Ruthenians were taught the Old Church Slavonic, Latin, and Greek languages, as well as various higher subjects.” Franko particularly stressed that this was a higher educational institution. It is striking that Franko, who was unacquainted with the documents available today (the 1578 Primer and the 1579 testament of Halshka Ostrozka), accurately identified the date of the founding of Ostroh Academy as 1577.

Today a number of authoritative scholars believe that the academy was founded in late 1576 or early 1577. Franko even hypothesizes that Vyshensky served at the prince’s court: his argument is that the polemicist sent messages to the prince from Athos. He also conjectures that Vyshensky may have been a student at Ostroh Academy.

Theories are simply hypotheses, but they are not without foundation, especially Franko’s speculation that Vyshensky was in Ostrozky’s service. It is known that the prince had a servant named Vyshensky. In his polemical opus Antirisis, Bishop Ipatii Potii mentions that a letter from Prince Ostrozky, dated June 21, 1593, was delivered to him “through Master Vasyl Surazsky and Master Vyshensky.”

The theme of Ivan Vyshensky and the Ostroh Academy runs through Franko’s dissertation on this Ukrainian polemical writer. In studying Vyshensky’s works, he naturally turned to the “Message to Prince Vasyl Ostrozky.” He believed that the author wrote this work after reading Khrystofor Filalet’s work Apocrisis written in Ostroh.

Delving into Vyshensky’s life story, Franko notes that he lived in Ostroh and served at the court of Ostrozky for whom he had a certain pietism. According to Franko, the polemicist put the name of this prince “at the head of one of his first messages in fact without any inner, material, necessity.” Franko also describes a hypothetical picture of service to the prince:

“Living at the court of such an illustrious gentleman as Ostrozky, who had a yearly income of one million from his properties, and in his court gave shelter to thousands of the most diverse people — noblemen, scholars, and artists, and ordinary ne’er-do-wells and rascals — was undoubtedly a great school for the young man. One should not think that he lived a life of luxury and ease: on the contrary, he learned here what it meant to be malnourished and lacking sleep; he always had to be on his guard, resolve thousands of small and large problems, attend to everyone, and suffer frequent humiliations and even vicious insults.

“At the same time, he learned to look at the very bottom of life, to tell genuine glitter from false; he could take advantage of the company of knowledgeable and experienced people, be in constant contact with people of the most diverse classes — from ordinary peasants to primates, senators, and kings. All this could not but considerably broaden the range of his knowledge and deepen his world outlook, all the more so as his soul was not that of a lackey but one inclined to a judicious, critical, and deeply moral approach. Only through this comprehensive school of life can one achieve the enormous knowledge of the world and people, which we encounter in our author, given his rudimentary and seemingly tardily acquired scholarly erudition. With this knowledge of real life, customs, and peoples’ characters, Vyshensky stood out markedly and positively from other contemporary and latter-day writers of clerical origin, although they were much more learned than him.”

Franko’s reasoning is based on his intuition rather than any real facts recorded in sources. Still, it would be wrong to discard this kind of “intuitive knowledge.” Franko had a profound understanding of a writer’s mentality, which, coupled with his detailed research on Vyshensky’s works, led him to such a conclusion. Franko’s dissertation cites direct references to the Ostroh Academy and the scholars who were connected with it. He focuses particularly on the Ostroh-based polemical writers H. Smotrytsky, V. Surazky, and Kh. Filalet.

Franko’s article “New Aspects in Studies of Ivan Vyshensky,” first published in the Proceedings of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, may be regarded as a supplement to his doctoral research. He writes that in his dissertation he did not do a detailed analysis of a Vyshensky work that his critics also ignored. This is a joint letter from a group of monks on Mt. Athos, published by Prince Ostrozky in 1598 in the supplement to the seven epistles of Patriarch Meletiy Pigas against the church Union, contained in the so-called Ostroh booklet of ten chapters. Although the author of this letter is not indicated, Franko unequivocally ascribes it to Vyshensky on the strength of his literary analysis. He also notes that this is the only work that was published in the polemicist’s lifetime.

Although in Franko’s opinion the letter is not a first-rate piece of writing, it is still “an interesting work that introduces a certain date in the chronology of these works (Vyshensky’s — Author) which earlier we had to determine through guess-work, [and] confirms the date of another important work — the epistles to the Uniate bishops — for which this message serves as a kind of short essay and synopsis and provides an important explanation of the effect that Vyshensky’s writings had on his contemporaries, who did not hesitate to print his message in the same book containing the messages of the highly placed and venerable Meletii Pigas.”

Franko also took an interest in the Ostroh Bible published by the academy. He noted that the Bible “has not received thorough study, as far as edition and sources are concerned.” In order to fill in the lacuna in some way, Franko analyzed the text of the Ostroh Bible’s Third Book of Ezra. This question is the subject of his article “Toward the Study of the Ostroh Bible,” published in the Proceedings of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Franko was convinced that the Third Book of Ezra had “no impact” on old Ukrainian literature: “Until the late 15th century, it was totally unknown if only because it was missing from the Greek canon.”

In his view, this book was first translated from the Latin Vulgate version in Novgorod and included in the so-called Gennady Bible. Moreover, the translation was far from perfect. The book aroused no interest here precisely because of its shoddy translation. In Franko’s opinion, it was an “undisputed fact” that the editors of the Ostroh Bible had taken the Third Book of Ezra from the Novgorod manuscript. He also argued that it was owing to the Ostroh-printed Bible that the Third Book of Ezra attracted the attention of the Ruthenians and was probably reflected in polemical literature.

Franko compares the text of this book in the Ostroh Bible with a text found in a Ukrainian manuscript collection that he dated to the 16th - 17th centuries. He believes that the recopied text was from the Ostroh Bible. But while the text of this Bible contains dialect words, Ukrainisms of the time, in this manuscript collection the anonymous copyist tried, in Franko’s view, to return to the older, “more correct,” archaic forms. Still, neither of these two translations from Latin is of high quality.

Franko the scholar could not have failed to spot this paradoxical situation. The manuscript, which purportedly appeared after the Ostroh Bible and was a copy of the latter, is more archaic than the original. Franko tried to provide a “psychological explanation” for this paradox: the translator was making a copy with a certain idea, not just mechanistically. This is why he “embellishes the text in an old color, revels in old forms, and uses them more systematically than the Ostroh Bible.” It looks as though the idea, engrained in Russian historiography, that the Novgorod-based Gennady Bible was the primary source of the Ostroh Bible played a nasty joke on Franko.

Contemporary scholars, including Rafail Turkoniak, are critical of this opinion. Although the Ostroh book printers regarded the Gennady Bible as an authoritative text, it was only one of many sources. They made wide use of various Old Slavonic, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew biblical texts. In light of Turkoniak’s latter-day studies of the Ostroh Bible, Franko’s information about the manuscript collection containing the text of the Third Book of Ezra can have a different interpretation. It is quite possible that Franko unearthed an old Ukrainian manuscript text that may have been used by the editors of the Ostroh Bible.

After writing his article on the Ostroh Bible, Franko continued, by all accounts, to study this edition and reached somewhat different conclusions about the originality of this book’s translation. Whereas in the beginning he regarded it as practically a copy of the Gennady Bible, in 1908 he wrote an article entitled “Contemporary Research on the Holy Writ, in which he stated: “What was published in Ostroh in 1581 (the Bible — Author) was a collection of ancient Ruthenian and Bulgarian translations and new translations from the Latin Vulgate.” This view of the Ostroh Bible is close to present-day opinion, since it has now been determined that the editors of this book used a large number of biblical texts from various languages.

Franko’s interest in polemical literature and the Ostroh Bible, as well as his familiarity with various historical materials, led Franko to assert that “the family of the Ostrozky princes played a very important role in the history of Southern Rus’ and the history of 15th-16th-century Poland.” He mentions members of this family in many of his works. He may even have been planning to write a monograph on the Ostrozky princes, based on authentic sources, or at least to publish these sources in full. Franko believed that the “letters and diaries of Prince Vasyl Kostiantynovych Ostrozky are, above all, worthy of publication and a special study.” This is confirmed by his article “Six Records of Prince Illia Kostiantynovych Ostrozky from 1535 to 1540,” which was published in the scholarly supplement to Uchytel [Teacher] in 1912.

This article analyzes six documents from the archive of the Sanhushko princes, which pertain to the private life of Illia Ostrozky, the brother of Vasyl Ostrozky. Franko thought that these documents had no particular literary or historical value, but they are still valuable “for the characterization and understanding of domestic and public life in those times because they show us...relationships in the direct words of an eyewitness, who did not think that he was writing for posterity.”

Franko planned to continue publishing these kinds of documents and even launch a series of books. In his opinion, these are monuments to “our spoken language, very often with extremely interesting and important details, figures of speech, and place names of those times. No less importantly, those documents often describe the events of everyday, family, and public life, which are overlooked by historians who prefer focusing on broader historical matters.” Franko adds that this is how Mykhailo Hrushevsky overlooked “the deeply tragic story of Halshka Ostrozka,” the only daughter of Prince Illia Ostrozky. According to Franko, “as a result of unusual circumstances, she became the heroine of a rather extraordinary romantic story that was untypical even for those times.”

Naturally, Franko was interested in Halshka Ostrozka’s fate not only as a scholar but also as a writer, evidence of which is his article on her father’s documents. It has now been determined that this woman was in fact the founder of Ostroh Academy. Neither Franko nor his contemporaries could have known this because scholars had not yet studied Ostrozka’s testament. Thus, Franko’s interest in the woman who founded the Ostroh Academy is in itself noteworthy.

In addition to the above-mentioned works, fragmentary notes on the Ostroh cultural center, its publications, the academy, the Ostroh polemicists, and the Ostrozky princes also appear in a number of other articles, surveys, and reviews by Franko, among them “The Works of Vyshensky,” “Our Theater,” “A Word about the Resurrection of Lazarus,” “The Life and Literary Activity of Ipatii Potii,” “Two Unions: A Little Picture from the History of Rus’ in the Late 16th Century,” “A Description of the Documents from the Archive of the Western Ruthenian Metropolitans,” and many others.

Thus, there are ample grounds to state that Ivan Franko was very interested in the Ostroh Academy’s pursuits and that his studies made a considerable contribution to the body of research on this cultural and educational phenomenon.