Truth attested by blood

Ivan Franko has always been one of those classic Ukrainian writers who never faded into the past. In fact, writers like him come from the future. This is precisely why his powerful voice appeals primarily to young people, the future of our nation, and determines their tasks and prospects. This is the secret of how Franko, the writer and thinker, is always important to Ukrainian culture and the nation-forming and state-building processes now underway in our country. If you listen to his voice, you will see that what makes the Kameniar (“Stonecutter”) stand out among hundreds of great spirits is his encyclopedic knowledge, the universality of his intellectual quests, colossal industriousness, and, above all, his constant orientation on the truth of Ukrainian existence. In fact, while Taras Shevchenko shows us this truth in various aspects and suggests fundamental models of understanding it, Ivan Franko demonstrates a never-ending and purposeful way to the truth, a road that leaves doubts, misconceptions, and erroneous ideas by the wayside.

This interpretation of Franko, based on an understanding of the deepest meanings of his work, is clearly at odds with the attempts of some latter-day “de-sacralizers” (Lina Kostenko’s definition) to falsify the Kameniar and present him to young Ukrainians above all as a Freemason, a peripheral and irrelevant writer, a dejected decadent with a divided psyche, a person with psychological problems, etc. The goal of these attempts is to nullify the fundamental, central, and unchangeable aspects of his thinking that this spiritual giant displayed, to a greater or lesser extent, from the beginning to the end of his life. It is about the national idea as the eternally important and unchangeable essence that shapes the system of social views, values, and mentality of every nation, which Shevchenko artistically formulated for future generations of Ukrainians.

The crux of the national idea is the idea of a nation’s self-sufficient political life and statehood, which Franko defined in his article “Beyond the Possible” (1900) as the “national ideal,” “the ideal of national self-sufficiency,” i.e., “the ideal of a full- fledged, unfettered, and unlimited... life and development of the nation.”

No nation can live and develop without the national idea. Otherwise, it will always face the threat of being re-enslaved and trampled beneath the boot of another colonizer. It is impossible to resolve various socioeconomic and cultural problems to the benefit of the people without this idea. Therefore, in order to know our own self, our world and time, and the prospects of young Ukrainians, one should look at all this through the prism of the national idea and Franko’s national ideal, through the prism of a person whose correct views were tested by time and attested by the blood shed by millions of Ukrainians in the 20th century. Here are a few examples of the importance and effectiveness of Franko’s idea on politics, the most vulnerable field of today’s Ukraine.

In 1883 the Kameniar wrote an article entitled “Our View of the Polish Question,” in which he asserts: “Feeling an ineradicable hatred ingrained in us by history for all kinds of oppression and violence, we also desire complete national and political freedom for the Poles. But only provided they forgo once and for all any dominance over us and refuse once and for all to build a historical Poland on non-Polish lands and, instead, favor, as we do, a purely ethnographic Poland.” Franko clearly states: “Poland for the Poles, Rus’ for the Rusyns [Ukrainians].”

In the same article Franko speaks out for “equal rights and autonomy of a nation, whereby another nation will never have the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of a neighbor or maintain any protection on it.” If we look at Ukraine’s relations with other countries, we will see that each of the powerful players on the international political stage — Russia, the US, and the European Union — are doing nothing but interfering in the “domestic affairs” of our nation: they are suggesting nothing but are imposing their “protection” on Ukrainians with imperial hauteur. The experience of Ukraine as part of the Soviet Union, under the Soviet colonial yoke, convincingly proves that a nation always pays with blood and slavery for this kind of “protection.” A rash aspiration to join, contrary to national interests, any international alliance — the Russian (SES), European (EU), or American (WTO or NATO) — will inevitably lead to a decline of the “equality and autonomy” of our nation. The impression is that this equality and autonomy constituted a value for the great Franko alone, while for our politicians these are just empty words that can be easily ignored.

In his work “What Is Progress?” (1903), the Ukrainian thinker scathingly criticizes social democratic and Marxist ideas of progress or the state. Following in the footsteps of the American nationalists Henry George, James Monroe, and Theodore Roosevelt, he also rejects superficial internationalism in public life and exalts the nationalist factor (“America for Americans and Rus’ for Rus’”) which alone can ensure the full-fledged development of a nation: “People are beginning to see that wealth, science, and art alone cannot make an individual completely happy. An individual can only be happy if he lives among other people, in a family, community, and nation. What lays the basic groundwork for any kind of progress is a reinforced feeling of love for other people, family, and community, as well as for one’s own people; without it, everything else will simply be a dead body deprived of a living soul.”

Now ask yourselves what kind of love our mass media, allegedly Ukrainian television, radio, and magazines, are cultivating. What are our political figures and some cultural figures worried about first and foremost? Are they really worried about the preservation and development of the Ukrainian language, the teaching of Ukrainian history and literature, the formation of a Ukrainian information space, and the reform of our education based on national values rather than on dubious “Bologna” and other “universal” ideas?” Do they care about Ukrainian churches, national culture, patriotic organizations, and the publication of Ukrainian books, and about many other things, national not in form but spirit, which clearly describe and shape the living love of an individual and the entire generation “for other people, the family, the community, and their own people?”

Unfortunately, this is a rhetorical question. This is why our nation is becoming impoverished and dying out while millions are seeking a better life abroad. This is why the Russification rate in independent Ukraine is higher than it was in Brezhnev’s times. A young thinking person cannot help seeing that what politicians of all hues are offering Ukrainians is not development but the opposite — they are turning Ukraine into an occupied territory, a huge ghetto, “a dead body deprived of a living soul.”

In “An Open Letter to Galician Ukrainian Youth” (1905), Franko presents a large number of very pressing problems to the nation’s future generations. For example, citing the Russian reality, the Kameniar sweepingly criticizes the ideology of liberalism as a doctrine that is cut off from the true life of the people, as “liberal autocracy.” and an imperialistic political force. “Liberalism is extremely theoretical and doctrinaire,” the Ukrainian writer declares, “and doctrinaires, even liberal ones, have always been the worst and most harmful politicians.” I wonder if these essential drawbacks of liberalism are known to those of our unfortunately influential politicians (allegedly conservative and nationalist) who openly admire this doctrinaire ideology and for over 15 years have been imposing on the Ukrainian people, under the guise of national values, such mythical cosmopolitan ideas borrowed from the West as “human rights,” “civil society,” “multiculturalism,” “Euro-Atlantic integration,” “privatization of land,” as well as tolerance of all kinds of Ukrainophobic organizations, propagation of sexual perversions, anti-Christian sects, etc. It is clear that Franko’s fellow thinkers could sooner be any individuals from among those contemporary Western philosophers, like the American John N. Gray, who speak about “high-handed liberal ideology,” an “ideology that fuels the illusions of legalism and rationalism and rejects the historical realities of concrete forms of national culture for the sake of the mirage of universalism.”

I could produce many more examples, but what has already been said is sufficient to reach the conclusion that Franko’s way of thinking is effective and still important. Let us ask ourselves why things are going the way they are in Ukraine. Why are all Ukrainian and nation-centered ideas, so amply expressed by Franko and our other classics, being played down and hushed up while all un- Ukrainian or anti-Ukrainian forces feel quite comfortable, thriving by feeding off the labor of an enslaved people? The answer may lie in a fact that has been noted by many well- known contemporary Ukrainian figures (L. Kostenko, V. Shevchuk, V. Donchyk, B. Oliinyk, A. Pohribny, and others): the present state of Ukraine, unfortunately, is not yet Ukrainian; it is not, to quote Shevchenko’s apt remark, a “house” that has “its own truth, strength, and liberty.” Does post-imperial Ukraine correspond to Franko’s national and political ideal? Hardly.

Let us turn to his poetic legacy. In his early march-like poem “Hey, the Sich Is Marching” the idea of consolidating “our cause” is expressed in the final stanza:

“Hey, the Sich is marching,/Horseshoes clattering!/Our freedom is in our house,/And all strangers — not on your life.”

Later, in the prologue to his poetic masterpiece “Moses” (1905), the Kameniar offers an enlarged view of this state:

“The time will come,/And you will shine like a flame/In the family of free nations./You will shake the Caucasus/And the voice of freedom will roll down the Black Sea./And you will gaze, like a true master,/Over your house and your field.”

Is the present generation of Ukrainians a “true master” of its own land? Do Ukrainians have a house and field of their own? Do they have a national state of their own, the much-proclaimed “Ukrainian Ukraine?” Unfortunately, the answer is negative. This is why the contemporary Ukrainian does not have genuine freedom from his own and foreign colonizers (zaid: “strangers”), a free and self-sufficient life in his own country, and normal international coexistence — only a kind of slavish, neocolonial, and persistent playing-up to the great powers. The Ukrainian cannot become a true master of his own land without his own state. We see this very clearly in the works of Franko, who lived and struggled for a better destiny not for himself but for all Ukrainians. It is a shame, therefore, that the absolute majority of Ukrainian political, civic, and cultural figures, in thrall to various imperial centers — be it East or West — are not following in Franko’s footsteps.

It is difficult for today’s young people (and not just the young) to make head or tail of the royal mess of this non-state and non-free life. It is hard to find a correct way of life and break loose from the multivectoral cultural and political slavery. But it is Franko and his legacy as a philosophical writer that can help here. In all probability, two of his thought-provoking ideas can be of greatest use in the conditions of our escalating collective enslavement. The first idea is the crucial necessity to develop the ability to take a critical view of those who lay claim to being leaders of the people: “Our mass inertia, which uncritically accepts the words of those who, by force of this or that circumstance, were placed ‘at the head of the people,’ became ambassadors, professors, chairmen of associations, etc., must give way to the lively, critical work of thoughts and readiness to express our voice always and everywhere, whenever it comes to the common cause, to do our duties in an active fashion, at our own risk but in full recognition of our rights as citizens.”

In another work, Franko offers the most reliable — national or nationalist — criterion of assessing the words, ideas, and contributions of every Ukrainian individual and, above all, every leader: “Everything that goes outside the framework of the nation is either Phariseeism on the part of people who would be glad to disguise their strivings to the supremacy of one nation over the other with internationalist ideals or the morbid sentimentality of visionaries, who would be glad to disguise their spiritual alienation from their own nation with broad ‘universal’ phrases.” If young Ukrainians of today and Ukrainian society as a whole take up the Kameniar’s ideas and instead of listening sheep-like to their dubious shepherds-leaders insist that they put into practice Franko’s national idea and the struggle to build a free, united, and independent Ukrainian state, a Ukrainian “house,” then the Ukrainian people will be able to live on their land as a master who is truly free, not a servant or a slave.

The Ukrainian nation has a chance to be transformed from a “paralytic on the crossroads” into a worthy neighbor in the “circle of free nations” not in a cosmopolitan “state of Ukraine” but only in its own national state. It is only in this future national state, only in a Ukrainian Ukraine that our nation’s future, the young people of Ukraine, will have a chance to develop in an all-rounded fashion and gain a better life. If we carry out Franko’s political will, we will have a chance to live happily. If we ignore his national ideal, we will continue to be “an anvil on which various foreign hammers beat out their melodies.”