Ivan Franko is sometimes called the second pillar of Ukrainian literature, standing beside Shevchenko. Unlike Shevchenko, he was almost impossibly prolific — a poet, novelist, playwright, translator, economist and scholar who wrote in several languages.
Nominated, then gone
Franko was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1916. He died that same year, before the committee met — one of literature's quiet near-misses.
A diary of longing
"Why Do You Come to Me in Dreams" comes from Ziv'iale lystia — "Withered Leaves" (1896), which Franko subtitled a "lyrical drama." It's a cycle of poems tracing an unrequited love so raw that Franko framed it as a found diary, as if he needed distance from his own feeling to publish it. The poem asks the impossible question every heartbreak asks: why does the person who won't have me in life keep arriving in my sleep?
Wear it
Our Franko tee carries the poem in Ukrainian and English. Part of our Poems for Ukraine line — NZ$5 from every shirt is donated.