Down and Out in Drohobych
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Many of the stories in this volume deal with the life of a young boy growing up in Galicia, in the far east of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the mid-1800s. They depict the poverty and difficult conditions in the region at that time. Although autobiographical in nature, Ivan Franko wrote that the stories could not unreservedly be considered a part of his autobiography, because in all of them he had allowed himself a fair amount of creative freedom.
Ivan Franko's stories often deal with people's struggles with their own conscience, agonizing over the morality of their actions. From those of a young boy having killed a bird, to those of a prisoner having killed a cellmate.
After his second arrest for his strident socialist views in 1880, Franko wrote the deeply psychological novella "Down and Out in Boryslav" in one night under extremely difficult conditions. In it he showed how different people reacted to being unjustly incarcerated.
From the torment imposed on children by Catholic schools of the time to the inner monologue of a burglar being punished by his victim, when reading Franko's prose, one has the stark impression of a director's movie camera shooting scene after scene.
The interests and aspirations of the common people were the cause to which Ivan Franko devoted all of his many and varied talents. Throughout his literary career his creative effort was invariably focused on working-class people and their struggle for a better future.
This book has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program.
Ivan Franko
Ivan Franko was born in a village near Drohobych, in the Austrian crownland of Galicia, and spent most of his working life in Lviv, its capital. He wrote poetry, novels, stories, plays, scholarship and journalism, translated widely, and was active in politics for most of his adult life; he was arrested three times between 1877 and 1889.He earned much of his living as a journalist, and he wrote for Polish and German papers as well as Ukrainian ones. That is part of the background of this novel. He wrote it first in Polish, in Vienna, at the end of 1892, hoping to publish it in Warsaw. It was not printed there. He began to make it over into Ukrainian the following year, and the Ukrainian book came out in Lviv in 1897.He took his doctorate in Vienna in 1893. In 1895 he gave his qualifying lecture at Lviv University, but the governor blocked his appointment. He went on writing for the rest of his life, and died in Lviv in 1916.
More by Ivan Franko
Yuri Tkacz
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Born in a working-class suburb of Melbourne, Australia in 1954, Yuri Tkacz grew up speaking no English until he entered school. A warm love for Ukraine and its literature led him to abandon his profession as an engineer, and in 1979 he began to translate Ukrainian authors into English full-time. His published translations include works by a diverse group of authors, such as Igor Kaczurowskyj, Oles Honchar, Anatoly Dimarov, Valeriy Shevchuk, Sergij Kariuk, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Yuri Yanovsky, and Borys Antonenko-Davydovych. He lived and worked in Canada in the early 1980s and in Ukraine in the early 1990s, but has now returned to Melbourne. His translations of Hardly Ever Otherwise by Maria Matios, Hard Times by Ostap Vyshnia, The Lawyer from Lychakiv Street by Andriy Kokotiukha, Precursor by Vasyl Shevchuk, and Boryslav in Flames by Ivan Franko have all been published by Glagoslav Publications.
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