Ivan Franko
Ivan Yakovych Franko (27 August 1856 - 28 May 1916) was a Ukrainian poet, writer, social and literary critic, journalist, interpreter, economist, political activist, doctor of philosophy, ethnographer, and the author of the first detective novels and modern poetry in the Ukrainian language.
He was a political radical and the founder of the western Ukrainian socialist and nationalist movement. In addition to his own works, he translated into Ukrainian the works of famous authors such as William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Dante Alighieri, Victor Hugo, Adam Mickiewicz, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller. His translations were performed on the Ruska Besida Theatre stage. He, like Taras Shevchenko, has had a huge influence on modern literary and political thought in Ukraine.
In his honor, the city of Stanyslaviv in western Ukraine (formerly Stanisawów, Poland) was renamed Ivano-Frankivsk in 1962. As of November 2018, there were 552 streets named after Ivan Franko in the Ukrainian-controlled part of Ukraine .
He is also known as Kameniar for his famous poem "Kameniari" (The Rock Breakers), which was written during the Soviet regime. Although he was a socialist, his political views did not always align with Soviet ideology. On April 8, 1978, astronomer Nikolai Chernykh named an asteroid 2428 Kamenyar in honor of Franko.
The Rising Hawk, a $5 million budget Ukrainian-American historical action film, was released in 2019. It is based on Ivan Franko's historical fiction novel Zakhar Berkut.
