MYKHAILO KOTURNYTSKYI (RECTE ERAZM KOBYLIANSKYI) IN THE CONTEXT OF RELATIONS WITH IVAN FRANKO

The paper refers to the Polish social and political figure of the 2nd half of the 19th — the early 20th century — Erazm Kobylianskyi. He was an emissary and a socialist and played a negative role in the life of Ivan Franko. Because of the E. Kobylianskyi I. Franko became one of the defendants in a high-profile trial of the socialists in Galicia in 1878. The paper outlines biography of this person, little known to Ukrainian researchers. Due to the fact that Kobylianskyi was a conspirator and had many aliases, not all facts of his life have been clarified yet. The researcher managed to find out some details of his biography due to the memoirs of his contemporaries. The main part of the study is focused on the issue of life contacts of I. Franko and E. Kobylianskyi. They met in connection with the pretrial investigation in the case of the socialist process in Galicia: that’s why an attention is also paid to certain aspects of this issue (in particular, the topic of socialism in Galicia of the 1870s, the trial of Franko and other accused). Franko himself never learned the real surname of Kobylianskyi and believed that he was dealing with Mykhailo Koturnytskyi (it was the most often used pseudonym of Kobylianskyi in Galicia). Polish authorities in Galicia of those days accused I. Franko of participating in a secret socialist society, in fact because of a letter by M. Drahomanov, which Kobylianskyi secretly brought from Switzerland to Lviv and had to pass it to M. Pavlyk. Can be considered as a matter of chance the fact that the police confiscated those letters? Could Kobylianskyi be a figurehead? The paper proposes answers to these questions with reference to reputable researchers and articles by Ivan Franko. Also, the study provides an analysis of the handwritten letters of Erazm Kobylianskyi to Ivan Franko from 1886. It is found out who was the author of the poetry collection "Ukrainki", published in 1884 in Lviv under the pseudonym Mychałko (Ivan Franko thought it was Kobylianskyi but was wrong).