The article is about the frankoznavchyi experience of one of the most productive researchers of the Ukrainian diaspora, the well-known Ukrainian scientist, journalist and editor Luka Lutsiv (1895-1984). First of all, about his monograph “Ivan Franko is a fighter for national and social justice” (1967). The importance of L. Lutsiv’s work provides not only for a complex illustration of I. Franko’s life and creative work, taking into account various com- plex moments, not only for a simple, lively presentation of the leading ideas, not only for the argumentative refutation of the valuations of the Soviet Franco studies, but also for the use of classical methods of research. The methodological base of his work was biographism (closely related to the cultural-historical approach) and hermeneutics. In the mono- graph we have not only the desire of the researcher to go deep into the artist’s biography and the cultural-historical context of the epoch, but also to protect Franko from the Soviet falsifications and to get to the essence of his creative work – the “truth” (in the terminology of classical philosophy). A literary scholar through the going out of the funda- mental hermeneutic layers understands this “truth”: the deep meanings, values, ideals and imperatives of the writer’s creative work, however, without more concrete terminological definitions. The work is also about the interpretation valuations of L. Lutsiv through the prism of main imperatives, which he identified in Ivan Franko, that is, categorical orders that appear at the same time as the main regulative idea of thinking and the system-forming element of the ideological base of the individual.
The first leading imperative for the researcher is the national imperative (the “ideal of independence”), which re- veals the national-centered (natsiosofskyi, natsionalistychnyi or natsiolohichnyi) component of I. Franko’s worldview. Another central imperative of I. Franko’s life and creative work is the social imperative associated with the problem of social justice. One can state that L. Lutsiv’s monograph, despite all the possible defects, today thanks to the classical methodological base can be positioned not only as a document of the epoch but also as a valuable scientific source, though probably not as academic but as a popular science genre. This study helps to understand I. Franko’s worldview and thinking as a definite integrity, as a complex system and gives significant impulses for the continuation of episte- mological studies of this kind.
Smilla, Anna og Alexandra – Videnskabskvinder i nyere dansk populærlitteratur