page_title: Ivan Franko
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Ivan Franko / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Ivan Franko (1856–1916), Ukrainian poet and writer, social and literary critic, journalist, economist, and political activist, with wife Olha Khoruzhynska. Українська: Франко Іван Якович (1856-1916), відомий український письменник, поет, вчений, публіцист, громадський діяч з дружиною Ольгою Хоружинською 1886 р. сфотографувалися у В. Висоцького одразу після одруження на пораду польської письменниці Е. Ожешко.
context_page_description: Ivan Yakovych Franko was a Ukrainian poet, writer, social and literary critic, journalist, interpreter, economist, political activist, doctor of philosophy, ethnographer, and the author of the first detective novels and modern poetry in the Ukrainian language.
  He was a political radical, and a founder of the socialist and nationalist movement in western Ukraine. In addition to his own literary work, he also translated the works of such renowned figures as William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Dante Alighieri, Victor Hugo, Adam Mickiewicz, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller into Ukrainian. His translations appeared on the stage of the Ruska Besida Theatre. Along with Taras Shevchenko, he has had a tremendous impact on modern literary and political thought in Ukraine.
context_section_description: Franko was born in the Ukrainian village of Nahuievychi located then in the Austrian kronland of Galicia, today part of Drohobych Raion, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine. As a child he was baptized as Ivan by Father Yosyp Levytsky known as a poet and the author of the first Galician-Ruthenian Hramatyka and who was exiled to Nahuyevychi for a "sharp tongue". At home, however, Ivan was called Myron because of a local superstitious belief that naming a person by different name will dodge a death. Franko's family in Nahuyevychi was considered "well-to-do", with their own servants and 24 hectares (59 acres) of their own property.
  Franko senior was reportedly to be a Ukrainianized German colonist, or at least Ivan Franko himself believed. That statement is also supported by Timothy Snyder who describes Yakiv Franko as a village blacksmith of German descent. Snyder however stated that Ivan Franko's mother was of Polish petty noble origin, while more detailed sources state that she came from an impoverished Ukrainian noble background, from the well-known Ukrainian noble family Kulchytsky and was remotely related to Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny. According to Yaroslav Hrytsak, Ivan Franko was of mixed German, Polish and Ukrainian ancestry.
  Ivan Franko attended school in the village Yasenytsia Sylna from 1862 until 1864, and from there attended the Basilian monastic school in Drohobych until 1867. His father died before Ivan was able to graduate from the gymnasium (realschule), but his stepfather supported Ivan in continuing his education. Soon, however, Franko found himself completely without parents after his mother died as well and later the young Ivan stayed with totally unrelated people. In 1875, he graduated from the Drohobych Realschule, and continued on to Lviv University, where he studied classical philosophy, Ukrainian language and literature. It was at this university that Franko began his literary career, with various works of poetry and his novel Petriï i Dovbushchuky published by the students' magazine Druh (Friend), whose editorial board he would later join.
  A meeting with Mykhailo Drahomanov at Lviv University made a huge impression on Ivan Franko. It later developed into a long political and literary association. Franko's own socialist writings and his association with Drahomanov led to his arrest in 1877, along with Mykhailo Pavlyk and Ostap Terletsky, among others. They were accused of belonging to a secret socialist organization, which did not in fact exist. However, the nine months in prison did not discourage his political writing or activities. In prison Franko wrote the satire Smorhonska Akademiya (The Smorhon Academy). After release, he studied the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, contributed articles to the Polish newspaper Praca (Labor) and helped organize workers' groups in Lviv. In 1878 Franko and Pavlyk founded the magazine Hromads'kyi Druh ("Public Friend"). Only two issues were published before it was banned by the government; however, the journal was reborn under the names Dzvin (Bell) and Molot (Mallet). Franko published a series of books called Dribna Biblioteka ("Petty Library") from 1878 until his second arrest for arousing the peasants to civil disobedience in 1880. After three months in the Kolomyia prison, the writer returned to Lviv. His impressions of this exile are reflected in his novel Na Dni (At the Bottom). Upon his release Franko was kept under police surveillance. At odds with the administration, Franko was expelled from Lviv University, an institution that would be renamed Ivan Franko National University of Lviv after the writer's death.
  Franko was an active contributor to the journal Svit (The World) in 1881. He wrote more than half of the material, excluding the unsigned editorials. Later that year, Franko moved to his native Nahuievychi, where he wrote the novel Zakhar Berkut, translated Goethe's Faust and Heine's poem Deutschland: ein Wintermärchen into Ukrainian. He also wrote a series of articles on Taras Shevchenko, and reviewed the collection Khutorna Poeziya (Khutir Poetry) by
caption: Franko with his wife Olha Khoruzhynska in 1886
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