Authors: Neal Ascherson
Others found the relationship horrifying on moral but above all on political grounds. For them, Karolina was a Russian informer and collaborator, no more. But Mickiewicz, then and afterwards, insisted that she was a good human being finding her own way through impossible difficulties. There were things about her which he resented; she was unfaithful to him, and he could not accept it when she tried to explain that he must always be 'one among others'. She could be a nuisance, pestering him to write her into poems or badgering him - probably at Witt's request - to show her his work journals. But, unlike everyone else, he never said that she was corrupt. Many years later, when he was in Paris, the American writer Margaret Fuller met Karolina on a ship and wrote to ask Mickiewicz who she was. He told her about the jealousy (i was too romantic and too exclusive'), and expressed hope that he would meet Karolina one day in Paris; he would give her some good advice and consolation 'if she is still as she used to be: kind and sensitive'.
These were odd words to use, but his view of their relationship was that he had done most of the taking. As a writer he took her life and unpicked it in his imagination. The theme of outer treachery concealing inner loyalty, of the betrayer who is really working in the enemy camp for the cause of those who think he or she has betrayed them, fascinated him and stayed with him. It inspired the narrative poem
Konrad Wallenrod,
which he composed soon after leaving Odessa, a mediaeval story about a Lithuanian double agent who joins the Teutonic Knights in order to destroy them. From this work the term 'Wallenrodism' arrived in the Polish language, to describe the sinister ambiguities and double-bottomed loyalties which most Poles know about from experience. But this theme also gave him the litde-known play
The Confederates of Bar,
a melodrama about an episode in eighteenth-century Polish history. Mickiewicz, by then an exile, wrote it in French to pay his family's bills; the Paris theatres turned it down and lost most of the manuscript, so that only two out of five acts survive. What remains turns out to be a thinly disguised account of Witt, Karolina Sobanska and some of the ominous police agents in Witt's pay. Here Karolina is plainly a 'Wallenrod'. As a Polish countess who is the mistress of the Russian general in Krakow, she is hated and despised by most other Poles, including her own family. But in reality the countess is working to save her fellow-countrymen from arrest, exile to Siberia and the gallows.
It looks as if this was the way that Karolina explained herself to Mickiewicz. It also looks as if he believed her. About now, he wrote The Hawk', a sonnet which is either unfinished or has lost its last line to some pair of scissors. It is about a bird of prey which has taken refuge from the storm by clinging to the yard of a ship; 'let no godless hand seize him ...' Then the sonnet goes on:
He is a guest, Giovanna; whoever seizes a guest,
If he's at sea, let him beware the tempest.
Remember my own, remember your own story!
You too on life's sea - you saw monsters,
And the gale drove me astray; the rain drenched my wings.
Why these sweet words, why these deceitful hopes?
Yourself in peril, you're a snare to others ...
But Karolina Sobanska, although she may have been a bird of prey, was not the loyal countess of
The Confederates.
She was no Wallenrod, either. Sobanska was a skilled and devoted agent of the tsar, who did untold damage to her own country in the next few years.
In 1830, the Poles rose once again against foreign occupation. The November Insurrection began in Warsaw and spread throughout Russian-occupied Poland and Lithuania in the following year, a desperate struggle fought in pitched battles against Russian regular armies and by partisan campaigns in the forests. As the rising began to fall apart in defeat, Witt was transferred to Warsaw in 1831 as military governor of the reconquered city, and he took Karolina with him. There she is said to have saved many captured Polish officers from deportation to Siberia, and to have visited the Polish wounded in hospital. But her main task was espionage. Witt sent her to Dresden, in Saxony, to infiltrate the leadership of the insurrection and the mass of Polish refugees who had gathered there. In Dresden she posed once more as a patriot and sympathiser, and she won the confidence of at least some of the refugee community. She not only reported political and military intelligence to Witt, but, if she thought it safe, tried to persuade demoralised Polish officers to make their peace with the tsar.
Curiously, and in spite of her reputation from Odessa, the Polish insurgents were more inclined to trust her than Witt's Russian masters. Tsar Nicholas I, who had succeeded Alexander in late 1825, remained intensely suspicious of her. When Witt took her to Warsaw, the tsar wrote to Paskevich, die Russian commander-in-chief, that Sobariska should not be allowed to stay in the city and that Witt's career would be blighted if he made the mistake of marrying her. 'She is the greatest and most dexterous of schemers, and a Pole to boot, who can use her blandishments and cunning to entrap anyone in her net... ' In another letter, Nicholas crudely described her as 'this piece of skirt who is about as faithful to Russia as she is to Witt',
Sobariska was ordered to leave Warsaw at the end of the year. Outraged, she wrote a long letter in French to Benckendorff, the supreme commander of the tsar's political police. This letter remained hidden in the secret files for more than a century until it was published in the Soviet Union in 1935» in a series of unedited and largely unknown documents concerned with Alexander Pushkin and his milieu. For the Polish literary world, it came as a horrible and humiliating shock.
My General, [she wrote] the prince marshal has just delivered to me the order given by His Majesty the Emperor about my departure from Warsaw; I submit to it with total resignation, as I would to the decree of Providence itself.
But may I be permitted, my General, to open my heart to you on this occasion and to tell you how overwhelmed by pain I feel, less by the decree which it has pleased His Majesty to issue against me than by the fearful idea that my principles, my character and my love for my master have been so cruelly judged and so unworthily distorted. I appeal to you yourself, my General, to you to whom I have spoken so openly, to whom I have written so frankly before and during the horrors which have disturbed this country. Only deign to cast your eyes over the past, which should already furnish enough to justify me! I dare to assert that there was never a woman who could display more
devotion, more zeal, more activity in the service of her Sovereign than I have, often at the risk of my own destruction . . .
The opinions which my family has always professed, the dangers which my mother incurred during the insurrection in the Kiev province, the conduct of my brothers, the bond which has united me for thirteen years with a man whose dearest interests were concentrated upon those of his Sovereign, the profound contempt which I feel for the nation to which I have the misfortune to belong; all, I dare to believe, should have set me above the suspicions of which I have now become the victim.
The letter goes on to detail some of her achievements: the penetration of the exiled insurrectionary command at Dresden, and her task of contacting and if possible turning leading Poles disillusioned by the failure of the November Rising. 'Polish by name, I was naturally the object here [in Warsaw] of those who, criminal in their intentions and cowardly in character, wanted to save their necks without actually renouncing their opinions or betraying those who had shared them.' The whole text reeks not only of ultra-conservative views (she refers to the Polish rebels as 'Jacobins'), but of an extraordinary loathing for her own fellow-countrymen.
I had to meet Poles; I even received some who were repugnant to my own character. But I could not bring myself to approach those whose very contact gave me the sensation of being licked by a rabid dog; I was never able to conquer this revulsion and, I admit, I may have missed some important discoveries because I would not submit myself to meeting creatures who filled me with horror . . .
Until
1935,
the Poles had been able to take seriously the Mickiewicz version: that Sobanska had been working as a double agent whose ultimate loyalty was to Poland. But this letter struck all her apologists dumb. It seemed, finally, that there had been no fascinating Romantic dualism, no mirror-play of double identities about Sobanska at all. She had been just a Russian spy.
If this was the ultimate truth about Karolina Sobanska, Mickiewicz did not know it when they met in his apartment in Odessa to make love, and it is clear that he died without knowing it.
But he came to the Black Sea with his own secrets, and how many of them he shared with her it is impossible to know. He was young and a Romantic, but he already had some hard political experience; he knew the difference between student unrest and serious clandestine work, and he also knew what should not be written down. Soon after his arrival in Odessa there had been a fuss about a playful
"Map
of the Black Sea", with which he had illustrated a letter to Malewski's sister Zosia in Vilnius; the letter was opened by Russian censors who thought the map was a coded military plan, and the file went all the way to St Petersburg and back to Vorontsov before it was reclassified as harmless. But Mickiewicz's discretion makes it difficult to know what he may really have been up to during his stay on the Black Sea. Some Polish historians give all his movements a conspiratorial significance. Others suggest more plausibly that, during these months before the catastrophic Decembrist rising in St Petersburg at the end of the year, Mickiewicz remained litde more than a well-informed spectator.
There were certainly secret contacts. He and the two other Polish exiles had met almost all the leading Decembrist plotters in St Petersburg, and the Decembrist leaders Ryleyev and Bestuzhev gave them a letter of recommendation to take to their comrade the poet Tumansky in Odessa: 'They are wonderful, brave boys! In their feelings and thoughts, they have been our friends for a long time. And Mickiewicz is a poet and darling of his country.' Tumansky was at the centre of the conspiracy's southern wing, which at the time seemed the more promising. In the spring of 18x5, when Mickiewicz reached Odessa, the plotters were developing a plan to stab Alexander I to death when he visited Taganrog on the Sea of Azov.
There were Polish conspirators already in Odessa, like Count Piotr Moszynski, a young nobleman who was a link between the Polish underground groups and the Decembrists. Mickiewicz met him, and must have discussed revolutionary politics, but nothing is known about what was said. Odessa was in any case full of foreign exiles with secret plans and dreams. The tsar had complained the year before to Vorontsov that 'people are arriving in Odessa from every direction, including the Polish province ... who deliberately and purposefully, or through their own thoughtlessness, employ themselves in spreading baseless and alarming rumours, which could have a harmful
impact
on feeble minds ... ' This was an enduring aspect of Odessa. Before Mickiewicz came, French
emigres
there had plotted the overthrow of Napoleon. In 1814, the Odessa Greeks had founded the
Philike Hetaireia
(Society of Friends) in order to achieve the 'Great Idea': the defeat of the Ottomans and the restoration of the Byzantine Empire. Long afterwards, Odessa gave the world Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of militant 'revisionist' Zionism, and Leon Bronstein, alias Trotsky.
Jan Witt knew about the plot for daggers at Taganrog. How much he knew is not clear, but it is not hard to guess who told him about it. He decided to make a visit of inspection to Crimea, in order to check on police readiness and political tensions, and being both sociable and shrewd, he turned the visit into a holiday house-party which would include some people he wished to know a little more about. In the middle of August 182
.5,
there assembled on the Odessa landing-stage, complete with parasols, wine, easels, albums and telescopes, a truly improbable group of people. There was Mickiewicz, and Witt himself. There was Karolina with her husband Hieronym, whom she was about to divorce. Her brother Henryk came; and a jolly, brainless fellow called Kalusowski who was a tenant on the Sobanski estates; and a gaunt, bespectacled Russian called Boshniak who said that he was an entomologist. With them travelled an assortment of servants, most of them Cossacks or Tatars.
Kalusowski had meant only to see them off, but he was unable to resist an offer of lunch on board the steamer and by the time he had finished he found that they were at sea. The first day was hot and calm; the second day brought a violent storm which Mickiewicz enjoyed on deck, strapped to the mast for safety, while the others lay below in agonies of sea-sickness. Finally they arrived at Sevastopol, and made their way by carriage to Evpatoria where Witt had rented a house. They were to stay in Crimea for nearly two months.