Overview

Combines scholarly approach with entertaining prose, very well received by the academic community and wider reading public. Recipient of several awards in Ukraine, Poland, and Austria (including the best book of the year) and is listed among top 5 books in Ukrainian history by Ukrainian Goodreads community. It exceeds national perspective. The book presents various groups of traditional society, including Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic peasantry, Hapsburg clerks, Polish nobility, and traditional Jews, presenting the changes these groups underwent during times of rapid transformation. The book covers the period and the territory a borderland between the Austrian-Hungarian and the Russian empires during the last decades of the nineteenth century that were crucial for shaping of modern Jewish, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian identities. By this token, it helps to trace the genealogies of these identities as well roots of the twentieth century conflicts in East Central Europe.

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9781618119681

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Reviews

Yaroslav Hrytsak's Ivan Franko and His Community (2019) is a pioneering volume that sits at the crossroads of three different genres. It is at once a biography of the Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko, a microhistory of eastern Galicia from the 1850s to 1880s, and a case study of the origins and meanings of the Ukrainian national movement. ... Hrytsak's study is a significant reexamination of Franko's life and legacy, one that will be a touchstone for scholars of Central and Eastern European literatures, modernism, nationalism, and socialism for years to come. --Nicholas Kupensky, H-Ukraine

This is a study of one of the most intriguing Ukrainian activists of a century ago by one of the most important Ukrainian thinkers of today. Anyone who wishes to see demanding theories of nationalism tested in the practice of nuanced historical research should read this book. It is the culmination of a long discussion about the origins of nations that began in the 1980s and one of the most important books in its fi eld. -- Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History, Yale University Yaroslav Hrytsak's brilliant study of Ivan Franko illuminates the history of Ukraine, Galicia, and the late Habsburg monarchy. Franko emerges as a dynamic, complex fi gure whose life and work were deeply important for the history of politics and ideas. Hrytsak presents him with great skill and subtlety, and this book should be read by anyone interested in the intellectual history and comparative literature of Eastern Europe. -- Larry Wolff, New York University, author of Inventing Eastern Europe and The Idea of Galicia Yaroslav Hrytsak is one of Ukraine's most prominent liberal intellectuals, an essayist and historian. 'Ivan Franko and His Community' is not his fi rst book on Franko, the writer and polymath, but it is certainly his most ambitious and best. The Ukrainian original was an award-winner in Ukraine. It is a conceptual book, very creative, and extremely readable in the excellent translation by Marta Olynyk. Franko's strong personality jumps from the pages. Franko was forever falling in love and making hot-headed marriage proposals, but Hrytsak also tells us about his more unconventional relationships. Franko consciously fashioned his self-representation as a son of the people, a peasant boy borne aloft into higher social spheres by the sheer power of his talent. But Hrytsak tells us a rather diff erent, and more interesting, story. I can recommend this book without reservation to lovers of biography, those curious about life in the peripheries of Habsburg Austria, and to readers who like to think. -- John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus of History and Classics, University of Alberta

Author Information

Yaroslav Hrytsak is an historian, public intellectual, and author of several books and numerous articles. He is a professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, the director of the Institute of Historical Research at Lviv National University, and the director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Modern Ukrainian History and Society of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. He has also taught at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Central European University (Budapest). He has received nine Ukrainian, Polish, American, or Austrian awards for his academic contributions and community involvement.

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