Under Review

Reviews by Robert Blaisdell

The Ukrainian Ivan Franko (1856-1916), a contemporary of Anton Chekhov, also started publishing stories very young. He outlived his Russian counterpart, but like Chekhov was often able to find humor in painful childhood moments. “This took place a long time ago,” he writes in “The Myktych Oak Tree,” one of Down and Out in Drohobych’s 17 tales. “Not only those times, but even the memories of them have dimmed in my mind. Occasionally, like lightning piercing darkness, moments from the past appear in a flash and evoke an indescribable melancholy. They shimmer and flicker, and joy, fear, laughter and tears become intertwined in them, and one’s memory is barely able to compose a vivid, true picture from such fragmented, chaotic recollections.” Franko’s narrators, however, are more than able to compose vivid pictures of old Ukraine. Memory is one of the collection’s primary themes. Franko creates a fine metaphor for it in “In the Carpentry Workshop”: “Life is like going on a long journey: what falls off your wagon is lost forever. And memories are like a concerned farmer, walking along that road many years later, seeking out those long-lost things.”

The title story, written in one night when Franko was 24, is about a hellish prison cell wherein the idealistic author-based protagonist encounters a thoroughly desocialized brute, Bovdur, who has lost among other things the ability to reminisce; that is, his “early years flashed before him in such fragmentary images, interspersed with words half-whispered. There was nothing comforting in them, nothing that the soul could find solace in or feel joy in recalling. His thoughts flew on and on, flipping through each memory like a man who had slipped money into a book and was hastily seeking to find the banknotes between the pages.” Bovdur is so disconnected from his integrity as a human being that he demonically murders the kindest man in reach: “Andriy Temera was no more… But what of his thoughts, his hopes – did they perish with him too?” Franko suggests that, no matter what, something of good always remains.