Creative dissonance as a mode of writing: the case of Ivan Franko

“Perebendia” has no messianic pretensions, feels no need to be the savior or the prophet of his people. He is unassuming and modest, yet invaluable to society by dispelling their sorrows. The sphere of activities of the kobzar, comporting himself appropriately to the given situation, always appealing to his audience's taste while at the same time suiting his own purposes.

Franko highlights the notion of kobzar as guardian of the purity of village life and promoting humane and sincere relations among people, between family members where strife is known to rule. Perebendia with a married couple and evil mother in law at a feast (z zhonatymy na benketi, de svykrukha zlaia), the mother in law as evil fate in the form of poplar tree (pro topoliu-lykhu doliu) sends out her daughter-in-law to the fields to gather all the flax; otherwise she will be transformed into a poplar tree. In another version it is the “kalyna”: In the meadow a guilder rose rustled: Oi u luzi kalyna shumila). A mother persuading her son to beat his wife: bind her hand and foot, thrash her black and blue: Ozmy, synu, drotiani vizhky, zviazhy mylii ruchenky I nizhky; Ozmy, synu, nahaiku-drotianku, spyshy mylu, iak chornu kytaiku) The son obeys his mother, beats his wife to death, later dies for his crime. The telling of the tale shocks and moves the people, arouses fear and sympathy, as it enlightens and uplifts them.

Franko helps the reader see the figure of Kobzar as a popular minstrel, serving the people by appealing to their humanity, awakening feelings of sympathy for the sufferings of their brothers and sisters, ennobling their hearts and minds while preserving historical memory; the greatness of the past is set down for future generations. Franko underscores essential differences between Mickiewicz's poet and Shevchenko's realistic figure drawn from Ukrainian life. In terms of his social and psychological makeup, Konrad is “a mystical and allegorical figure, the creation of a fertile, overwrought romantic imagination, not appearing in national costume, no specific locality.” (105) Shevchenko, though lacking in a similar breadth of conception and imaginative power, makes his hero more dexterous, more representative of the people, realistically reflecting his origin in a peasant family and a youth spent in serfdom. Franko takes pains to elucidate the concept of the Kobzar. In Perebendia he describes the widespread respect for lyre players in the greater Ukrainian community whose task it is, among others, to remind people of God and good deeds (107).

In one of his final testaments to the poetic greatness of Shevchenko and his immense significance for his people, an essay of 1914 entitled simply “Taras Shevchenko, Franko employ's his own poem. The poem is dedicated to Shevchenko, declaring him a Great

Power in the commonwealth of human culture, one who “sighed for ten years in the Russian soldiery, and has/ done more for the freedom of Russia than ten victorious armies.” (110) Editor's Note (R. W. Seton-Watson) A stillborn project, a new quarterly The European Review devoted to problems of nationality and lesser-known continental literatures, due to outbreak of war; Franko sent a manuscript in honor of the centenary of Shevchenko, his countryman, waited ten years for publication.

In a distilled summation drawn from his lifelong study of Shevchenko, Franko refers to him as a “living creator, working and struggling for the downtrodden human rights of an enslaved peasantry and of the long-neglected Ukrainian people, but also as the champion of all the oppressed” (111). Elevated to the role of spiritual leader of his countrymen and their greatest poet. His poems describe his yearning for a free life, for the individual and society. He remained true to this ideal of freedom throughout his life. “I know of no poet in the literature of the world who made himself so consistently, so wholly, so consciously the defender of the rights of woman to a full and human life. The surmounting of his own sorrow and the dedication of all his strength to the dream of the welfare of humanity -- his legacy to the world.” (116)

The preceding discussion sought to present the latent intention and orientation made explicit by the author's taking stock of his creative and critical aims and his people's and his own place in the world. The ambivalence of the writer's tendencies led to a psychological and creative impasse which led to a reassertion of his intentions expressed in a unified manner, both critically in his championing of Shevchenko and creatively in his later writings, especially Moses (1905). The existential implications of his thought expressed in his writings reveal a strong degree of continuity in his shift from Mickie- wicz to Shevchenko in his support of the humanitarian ideal. What he approves of and what he condemns were connected with his personality and sensibility, with his aesthetic preferences and ethical views, his radical reversals and deep-lying continuities, and ultimately, the overcoming of his ambivalent and shifting attitudes toward Poland and his full embrace of the Ukrainian idea.

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