Franko, a prolific Galician Ukrainian writer, scholar, and journalist, was a master of several genres; his works also show an extraordinary variety of themes. His earliest published works include a series of romantic historical novels and a group of naturalistic portrayals of the conflict of nascent industrialism and labor in the Ukraine. Other works depict the social disintegration of the gentry and the attempts of the new intelligentsia to supplant it. He is perhaps best known for his epic verses, especially the great epic Moses (1905), in which he expounds his philosophy of the nation and the role of the charismatic personality.
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