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.