Down and Out in Drohobych

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>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.</span></p><p></p><p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Ivan Franko's</strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)> 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.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>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.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>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.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>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.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>This book has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program.</span></p><p></p>