Ivan Franko

Ivan Franko (August 27, 1857 - May 28, 1916) was a Ukrainian poet and writer, social and literary critic, journalist, economist, and political activist.

In 1880 Franko was arrested and sent to the infamous Siberian prison compound of Kolyma where he spent three months. His impressions of this exile are enumerated in his novel Na Dni ("On the Bottom").

In May 1886 Franko married Olha Khorunzhynska. His wife was to later suffer from a debilitating mental illness, one of the reasons that Franko would not leave Lviv for treatment in Kyiv in 1916, shortly before his death.

In 1902 students and activists in Lviv, embarrassed that Franko was living in poverty, purchased a house for him in the city. He lived there for the remaining 14 years of his life. The house is now the site of the Ivan Franko Museum.

He died in poverty and was buried at the Lychakivsky Cemetery in Lviv.