Ivan Franko was born August 15, 1856, in the little village of Nahuyevichi, in the foothills of the Carpathians only five years before the death of Shevchenko. He was the son of a poor farmer-blacksmith. The boy was not deprived of the opportunity of a formal education. Quite the reverse. He early learned to read and write Ukrainian, Polish and German and he received most of his early education in a German speaking school conducted by the Basilian Fathers. His father died when he was eight years old and his mother soon married again but his stepfather treated him kindly and helped him with his education. On finishing the elementary schools, he entered the gymnasium in Drohobych and during his entire course he stood almost continuously at the head of his class. His clothes may have been ragged and tattered and he may have been shy and retiring, but he showed clearly that he had an acute mind and a great deal of endurance. He dabbled in literature along with many of his fellow students but there was still something youthful about his works and they did not appear in all of their later perfection. In 1875 he entered the University of Lviv at a time when practically all the lectures were given in Polish and he was at once plunged into the frenzied academic debates about the problems of Galicia and the fate of the Ukrainians there. He listened for hours to the bitter partisanship over the form of the language to be used in the province and soon realized the sterility and artificiality of the entire controversy. In his first period at the University, he drifted into the Academic Circle, a group of students that were rather Moscophile in tendency. At least this group had access to a journal which could publish his writings, and besides it appeared to be more serious and less devoted to society and frivolity than some of the groups that were more purely nationalistic. It was about this time that he became interested in the writings of Mikhaylo Drahomaniv, (1841-1895) who was the leading Ukrainian scholar of the day. Drahomaniv, a great democrat, had taken a relatively advanced position and was frowned upon as a radical in many quarters. Yet he held firmly to the idea that the Ukrainians in both sections should cooperate closely and in order to work more freely in this connection he moved to Geneva, from which point he found it easier to communicate with the leaders on both sides of the Russian-Galician border, and later he was professor in the University of Sofia, Bulgaria.