Authors: Neal Ascherson
For most of the time, Witt and Karolina remained at Evpatoria and ostensibly did little but bathe and enjoy the sun. Mickiewicz roamed all over the southern mountains of the peninsula, sometimes riding on his own with a guide, sometimes in the company of Henryk Rzewuski. The silent Boshniak came too, whenever he could. In the various accounts of this Crimean journey the dates are hopelessly muddled, so that it is not possible to make out exactly where Mickiewicz went and whom he met. He certainly visited the inland city of Simferopol, and he went to see the palace of the Crimean Tatar khans at Bakhchiserai and the rock dwellings of the Karaim in the fortress-mountain of Chufut Kale nearby. He climbed the heights of Shatir Dagh, and slept in Tatar cottages. But there are signs that he did more than tourism. One version asserts that in Simferopol he met the Russian dramatist and diplomat Alexander Griboyedov, who had just completed his masterpiece
Woe from Wit;
Griboyedov was connected with the Decembrists, and he may have arranged a conspiratorial contact for Mickiewicz with the Polish writer Gustaw Olizar.
This meeting, in Olizar's house on the Crimean sea-cliffs, certainly took place. Mickiewicz appears to have stayed for a week or so with Olizar, sleeping in a hut on the beach, talking to Tatar villagers and borrowing books from Princess Golitsyn who had settled in her own solitude a few miles along the coast. He would certainly have talked politics in the evenings with his host, for Gustaw Olizar was yet another typically ambiguous poet-conspirator. He had fallen in love with Maria Rayevskaya, daughter of a Russian general and a young woman who had also caught the fancy of Pushkin. When her father refused to consider him as a suitor because he was a Pole and a Catholic, Olizar had taken Romantic flight from a cruel world. He had bought a piece of land at Gurzuf, on the flanks of the Ayu Dagh promontory over the Black Sea, and built himself a comfortable hermitage in which to enjoy his loneliness. He named the house 'Cardiatricon' (Heart's Remedy), and devoted himself to the composition of melancholy verses and memoirs about lost love. Near the shore, Olizar set about constructing a Temple of Pain', surrounded by cypresses and dedicated to Woman.
It was never completed. Olizar, in spite of his apparent unworld-liness, was also closely involved with the Decembrists. In 1826, after the terrible fiasco of the Decembrist rising in St Petersburg and the failure of the southern wing of the plot to capture Kiev, he was arrested and his property was seized. From Romantic exile, Olizar graduated to the real thing. 'Cardiatricon' was bought cheap by the Golitsyn family, who knocked it down and built a luxurious villa, and today the site is covered by a half-abandoned sanatorium which used to belong to the Soviet Ministry of Defence.
Every so often, Mickiewicz would return to base at Evpatoria and rest for a day or so with Witt and the remainder of the house-party.
But Sobanska found him reluctant to talk about his experiences. She gave him one of her own notebooks, and warned him that if he did not write down his more interesting meetings and conversations and impressions, he would forget them. In return for the gift, he was to show her what he had written when he returned. He did so, but she found that he had put little on the pages but sketches of the landscape and Tatar costumes. Kalusowski told her later that Mickiewicz kept what looked like a set of blank cards in his pocket, and sometimes sat down and scribbled vigorously on them. But she never managed to read those cards.
And yet in a way she did eventually read them. They carried the notes, allusions and literary ideas which came to Adam Mickiewicz as he rode or climbed over the Crimean mountains, and which he developed that winter and the following year into the
Crimean Sonnets.
There are eighteen of them, first published in 1816. In Poland, they are still widely known, quoted and taught. They are 'easy', compared to other, denser short poems which he was composing at the same time, and some of them are popular simply because they carry a charge of patriotic emotion. They are very direct and yet curiously restless poems, constantly changing focus or tone of address, often rebelling against the confinement of the sonnet form. One device of restlessness is memory; 'the poet', surveying some exotic scene, will be stabbed by recollection of another landscape (northern and lost), by the sound of a Polish voice, even by sheer otherness and distance. 'The Akerman Steppe', the first of the Crimean Sonnets and in some ways the best, is not about Crimea at all, but about travelling across the plains inland from the Dniester estuary, near the colossal fortress of Akerman. Mickiewicz evokes the oceanic silence of the steppe, in which he can hear a butterfly trembling on a blade of grass:
Caressing herbs, the belly of a serpent crawls.
In such a quietness, I cock my ear so sharp
I'd hear a voice from Lithuania. — Drive on, none calls!
In these poems, for the first time, there appears the Mickiewiczian image of the poet as pilgrim. In some of them, the pilgrim is a Moslem guided across Crimean mountains and dales by a holy
Mirza;
in others, the journey is openly the poet's exile from 'the dear land from which I am cut off. A few years later, Mickiewicz was to write the
Book of the Polish Nation and of the Polish Pilgrims,
addressed to the emigration which settled abroad after the failure of the November Rising in 1831. In this strange work done in the Biblical manner, which became a rod and staff of comfort for the Polish exiles through the worst times of despair, the pilgrimage is more than merely a metaphor of the physical wandering of the Poles in alien lands. It becomes a Way of the Cross, by which God's chosen nation, crucified and put down into the tomb, would find its path through suffering to resurrection and the redemption of all nations in liberty. 'When on your pilgrimage ye shall arrive in a city, bless it, saying: our Liberty be with you! If they receive and listen to you, then shall they be free, but if they despise you, are deaf to you and drive you away, then shall your blessing return to be with you ...'
In the same book, Mickiewicz wrote that the Polish nation is not dead: its body lies in the tomb but its soul has descended into limbo ... to the life of all peoples enduring servitude in their own countries and outside them, so that Poland might be witness to their sufferings.
But on the third day the soul shall return to the body; the Nation shall arise again and deliver from servitude all the peoples of Europe.
And three days have already passed; the first ending with the first fall of Warsaw; the second day with the second fall of Warsaw; and the third day cometh but it shall have no end.
As at the resurrection of Christ the sacrifice of blood ceased upon the earth, so at the resurrection of the Polish Nation shall war cease among Christendom.
This was the extraordinary doctrine of Messianism, the identification of the Polish nation as the collective reincarnation of Christ. Messianism steadily gained strength over the next century-and-a-half. History saw to that.
Almighty God! The children of a warrior nation raise their disarmed hands to you from every quarter of the world. They cry to you from the bottom of Siberian mines and the snows of Kamchatka, from the plains of Algeria and the foreign soil of
France ... By the blood of all our soldiers fallen in the war for faith and liberty, deliver us O Lord! By the wounds, tears and sufferings of all the prisoners, exiles and Polish pilgrims, deliver us O Lord!
That was written in
1
83
2.
It could equally well have been written in
1944,
in the aftermath of the Warsaw Rising.
Messianism was not the only idea that Mickiewicz developed on the Black Sea coast. Like almost every writer in the generation of Goethe and Byron, he acquired 'Orientalism'. It was a universal fashion, and the impact of Crimea and its peoples on a young man who had never seen a mountain before, let alone an Islamic culture, was lasting. But his Orientalism was free of the patronising discourse of Western superiority, 'civilisation' contrasted to Eastern 'decadence', which became common elsewhere in Europe. He saw in the Crimean Tatars and in the relics of their khanate at Bakhchiserai not only a humanity and delicacy which was lacking in Slav Christendom, but a brother-people which had shared with Poland the fate of conquest and humiliation at the hands of Catherine and Russian power. Mickiewicz was able to assimilate this respect for Islam to his own Catholic enthusiasm, and in later years he found no difficulty in collaborating with the Ottoman Empire in the cause of Polish independence.
And it seems to have been in Crimea that Mickiewicz completed the mental structure of his own highly personal reverence for Judaism and the Jewish people. He already knew the Jewish communities of Lithuania: the Hassidic traditions of intellectual mysticism which had centred upon Vilnius, the
shtetl
life of small towns and villages and, probably, the Karaite colony at Trakai between Vilnius and Kaunas. But Evpatoria in Crimea was still then the 'capital' of the Karaim, and in Evpatoria Mickiewicz made a point of studying their customs and beliefs. Later, in his French exile, Mickiewicz was to insist on the seniority of the Jews to all other nations, as the first people to receive the divine revelation; and he was to argue - often to the irritation of the political leaders of the Polish emigration - that Jews should play a leading part in the struggle for independence. He considered, at a practical level, that Polish and Lithuanian Jews would make good soldiers, and that the peasantry would be more easily drawn into another insurrection if the Jews had already joined it; they had, he argued, great respect for Jewish realism.
These views were not so eccentric or unusual as they later came to seem. They were a voice from the lost, more tolerant world of the old commonwealth, in which Polishness had been a matter of political loyalty rather than of race or religion. It had seemed normal, for example, that a regiment of Jewish light cavalry should have fought to defend Warsaw against the Russians and Prussians during the 1794 Rising against the Partitions. Catholic anti-Semitism - though widespread enough in the commonwealth - did not yet pretend to represent some patriotic interest. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that the 'modern' nationalism of Roman Dmowski and his National Democrats began to preach that a 'true Pole' was a Polish-speaking Catholic Slav, and that the other communities who had co-existed under the Royal Commonwealth - the Jews above all - were obstacles to the realisation of the 'national interest'.
By the time of his Crimean journey, Mickiewicz knew that he would soon be leaving Odessa again. Within weeks of his arrival, the authorities in St Petersburg began to feel uneasy about what company the three Poles might be keeping in New Russia, and long, gentlemanly exchanges began about his next destination. Mickiewicz wanted the Caucasus, St Petersburg would not agree, and in the end he had to consent to a post in Moscow. He returned to Odessa from Crimea in mid-October. A month later, he and Jezowski boarded the Moscow coach. A vigorous, ice-cold poem, 'Thoughts on the Day of Departure', presents a last walk through his empty and silent apartment, an impatience to be gone, a shrug at the absence of any tearful cheek or eye in this 'sad, alien city'.
He and Sobahska had already broken up, apparently over another man and her dislike of 'exclusivity'. Without her, it became harder to be casual about Jan Witt's professional activity. Then, not long before his departure, there took place a small, grisly event which Mickiewicz never forgot.
Some two weeks after the party's return from Crimea, he went to dinner at Witt's. As the guests arrived, a tall, thin officer in uniform stalked into the dining-room, epaulettes on his shoulders, his chest heavy with medals. Because the man was no longer wearing spectacles, it took Mickiewicz a few seconds to recognise Boshniak, the 'entomologist', but when he did so he was, for perhaps the first time in Odessa, seriously frightened. After the meal, he took Witt aside and asked, as lightly as he could: 'Mats
qui est done ce monsieur}
I thought his only job was catching flies.' Witt answered meaningly: 'Oh, he catches all kinds of flies for us!'
Next day, the three male Poles who had been on the Crimean excursion sat down to an anxious conversation in which they tried to work out exactly what Boshniak might have overheard or seen, or read in letters left in bedrooms. But they had to wait some months, until the trials of the Decembrists, before they could be finally certain about his identity. Alexander Karlovich Boshniak, it turned out, had been a major in the Ministry of the Interior when he set out on the Crimean journey, but had been promoted to colonel by the time of the trials, in which he was mentioned as a distinguished investigator.
He was in fact Witt's senior counter-intelligence officer, just possibly a man who reported to St Petersburg on Witt himself, and during the spring and summer of
1
825 he had been leading the unit assembled to penetrate the assassination plot against Alexander I. A daring, rather imaginative man who wrote travel books and novels, Boshniak had developed a simple technique: he would call upon a conspirator, disclose that he was a police agent and then, declaring revolutionary convictions, beg to be allowed to join the plot. These were trustful, amateurish times. Boshniak had several successes with this approach in Odessa. One legend says that he managed to arrange a meeting with three of the most important Decembrists in St Petersburg, and told them that General Witt was secretly disaffected and wished to be assigned a role in their plans. Pavel Ivanovich Pestel, the leading figure in the conspiracy, was tempted to take Boshniak's offer seriously until his colleagues took him aside and talked sense into him.