Taras Franko’s Scientific Memoir Book “About the Father”: History of Publication, Censorship, and Soviet Conjuncture

The article is devoted to the scientific memoir book “About the Father” (1956) by Taras Franko (1889–1971), the eldest son of Ivan Franko. The purpose of the study is to reveal the history of the publication of the book “About the Father”, to find out the circumstances of its writing, censorship and cutting out “unwanted” text fragments, to find out the author’s true creative intentions and the real conditions of Soviet reality that influenced the structure and content of the book. The study is based on historical and documentary research using analytical, synthetic, biographical, cultural, historical, and genological methods. The novelty of the study lies in the comprehensive coverage of the history of the publication of the scientific memoir book “About the Father”, the comprehension and introduction into scientific circulation of a number of facts and documents that were in public and private archives and were out of the attention of researchers. On the basis of the analysis of new facts and texts, conclusions are drawn about the peculiarities of Taras Franko’s creative style in the period of the 50s and 60s of the twentieth century. It’s found that the book “About the Father” reflected, on the one hand, the author’s own intentions designed to preserve and convey to society the true image of his father, and on the other hand, it represented the messages and opportunistic ideologemes that the Soviet government broadcast through the son of the famous classic. Often, both of these factors were combined in one text, creating a strange mix of truth and frankness with outright lies, concealments, and distortions. The writing, compiling, publishing, and reprinting of the scientific memoir book “About the Father” demonstrates the complex process of Taras Franko’s adaptation as the son of a famous classicist to the Soviet system, its ideologemes, and propaganda goals. Most of Taras Franko’s texts that showed the writer as a living person weren’t included in the book and today constitute a valuable layer of factual material that their author tried to convey to society. The book “About the Father” was doomed to become only a sample of what was allowed, the official studies about Franko.