Fateful Crossroads (Turbulent Times, Vol. 3)
Ivan Franko, Ukraine's greatest man of letters, was the gifted son of a village blacksmith. He completed his doctorate in Ukrainian language and literature at the University of Vienna in 1893; however, because of his involvement in radical socialist movements for which he was imprisoned three times as a young man, he was denied a tenured appointment to the University of Lviv that now bears his name. His literary works (poetry, prose, and dramas) and scholarly output in areas as diverse as linguistics, ethnography, politics, sociology, and literary criticism fills more than fifty volumes. A prolific translator, he worked with numerous ancient and contemporary languages and became known as "the golden bridge" between Ukrainian and world literatures.