Authors: Neal Ascherson
The current
wojt,
Frederic Nowicki, sits under the arbour of his hotel garden and offers guests glasses of tea and
naleszniki
pancakes. In fluent Polish, he points out what is taking place on a map of Polonezkoy spread out on the table. Prince Adam's island, the patch of Slav fields radiating from the village street, is slowly submerging; the state forests are lapping over one corner, the sanatorium builders and country-club developers over another.
For one more generation, Polish will be spoken in the street here, and Mass will be celebrated in the church with 'Under Thy Protection, We Take Refuge' written across its chancel arch. But the colony itself, as a self-governing outpost of Poland, is over. Mr Nowicki is still a young man. It seems likely that he will be the last
wojt
of Adampol.
When the last Polish-speaker is laid in the ground at Polonezkoy, the monuments will remain. One of them, outside the church door, is a bronze slab with a bas-relief portrait: 'To Our Bard: Adam Mickiewicz, on the anniversary of his death'. Another, the most magnificent tomb in the village cemetery, consists of an altar surmounted by broken classical columns. On the tallest column is carved the crowned White Eagle; on the side of the altar is the
Pogori
— the charging horseman with raised sword who is the crest of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Here lies Ludwika Sadyk, born Sniadecka, 'daughter of Jendrzej and niece of Jan, wife of the general commanding the Ottoman Cossack Dragoons; died in February 1866 at Dzehangir in Constantinople, buried in Polish soil at Adampol'.
Mickiewicz had once written about how, as death approaches, first things return to mingle with last things. In
185 5,
when he came to Istanbul in the last months of his life, he found there a woman whom he had known as a young girl in the Lithuanian countryside. For the Vilnius students, Ludwika Sniadecka had been a pretty, black-eyed young woman who had been famous for her alarming opinions about women's rights as a programme for the next revolution. Her father was professor of chemistry at the university of Vilnius and her uncle was the university's Rector; 'Ludwisia' was afraid of nobody, and when the young poet Juliusz Slowacki fell in love with her, she told him firmly that he could expect friendship but nothing more. As an exile in Paris, he was still dreaming vividly about her nearly twenty years later.
In Istanbul, Ludwika treated the middle-aged Mickiewicz not only as a bard but as an old friend. Experienced in problems of poverty, pride and emigration, she realised at once that his health was bad and that he was concealing the fact that he was too poor to eat properly. She tried in vain to lure him into comfortable lodgings: to a hotel in the Pera district, or to her own tall wooden house above the Bosporus at Be§ikta§. But Mickiewicz preferred to remain in what she called his 'holes'; a damp, dim cell in the Lazarist monastery at Galata, and then later a single unfurnished room in Pera. One visitor said, hauntingly, that it was 'the sort of half-empty room you might find at the back of an inn, on some Ukrainian country road, in autumn.'
Ludwika Sniadecka had married one of the wildest of all Romantic exiles. Michat Czaykowski, another well-born Eastern Pole, had led partisans in the forests of western Ukraine during the November Rising of
1830.
Escaping to Paris, he wrote lively historical novels about Cossacks and gypsies and, at the same time, managed to persuade the French intelligence services that he was not only a trained conspirator but an expert on Near Eastern politics. Despatched to Istanbul in
1851
with Ludwika, he staggered his French employers by converting to Islam and joining the Turkish Army. Michal Czaykowski became General Sadyk Pasha.
Ludwika, it seems, thought this would be a wise move. She turned out to be right. Within a few years, the Crimean War had broken out, the very conflict between Russia and the Western Powers allied with Turkey for which the Poles had been praying. Prince Adam Czartoryski in Paris urged all Poles to support Turkey, and at
Burgas, between Istanbul and the Danube mouths, Sadyk Pasha began to raise an army. It was supposed to be a Polish legion. Many Poles came from France and Britain to join it. But it also recruited in the Allied prisoner-of-war camps for anyone willing to change uniform and fight against the tsar. The force under Sadyk Pasha came to include large numbers of Ukrainians, Cossacks and Jews. These 'Ottoman Cossacks', although blazing with enthusiasm, were a mixed bag.
During the Crimean War, Ludwika became the most important political figure of the Polish emigration in Turkey. Among other functions, she acted as liaison officer between the commanders of the Polish forces training in their base at Burgas, on the Black Sea coast, and political visitors from Paris concerned with how to use the 'Ottoman Cossacks' as a bargaining counter to influence the Allied war aims. This woman — whose tomb so typically describes her as a man's daughter, a man's niece and a man's wife — spent much of her life giving men orders and seeing that they carried them out. In return they charged her with 'bossiness', which she ignored, and complained that she was 'hard', which she was not.
Adam Mickiewicz arrived in the autumn of
1
8 5 5,
on the steamer
Mont Thabor
from Marseille. His cover-story was a research trip to study education in the Balkans, but he paid little attention to Ottoman schooling. He felt happy, for the first time in years. The war in Crimea seemed to be going well, and he was back in the Islamic world again for the first time since his journey to Crimea. Going ashore at Smyrna on the way, he did not bother with the conventional sights. 'I found something else worthy of my attention,' he wrote in a letter. 'I saw mounds of dung and garbage, bits of bone and crockery, the sole of an old slipper, some loose feathers. That really appealed to me. I stood there staring for a long time; it was what one used to see in front of a Polish country inn.'
He liked living hard. He was genuinely short of money in Istanbul, but he may also have wanted to show himself that at fifty-seven he could still exist like a nomad, a soldier or a student. In the Lazarist monastery, Mickiewicz slept under his greatcoat and used his trunk as table and bookcase. He had brought his favourite stick, a 'pilgrim staff, and he followed his own favourite morning routine: a glass of Turkish coffee topped with thick cream and laced with cognac, followed by vigorous pipe-smoking. Up at Burgas, he was happy too. Back in 1848, at another moment when the iron landscape of European autocracy seemed to be falling apart, he had raised his own Polish legion in Rome and marched with it through Milan to challenge the might of the Habsburg Empire. Now, in the company of Sadyk Pasha, Ludwika's husband, he slept under canvas again and rode about watching the Polish forces, the Ottoman Cossacks, at their training. He went hunting in the hills, and listened to soldiers' songs round the camp-fire.
The optimism did not last long. Mickiewicz fell out with Sadyk. A political crisis was building up between Burgas and Paris; Sadyk wanted supreme command of an independent Polish force under the sultan, while Czartoryski preferred a British plan for dividing up the Poles between several foreign commands and accused Sadyk of hankering after dictatorship. But this did not bother Mickiewicz. Sadyk was the sort of impulsive eastern Pole he liked, and he shared his instinct for a free Polish army fighting as a recognised, distinct member of the anti-Russian coalition. His difficulty with Sadyk was about the Jews.
Mickiewicz had travelled a long intellectual journey in his reflections about Jewish destiny. There is a possibility that his own mother came from a 'Frankist' family, from the eighteenth-century Ukrainian sect led by the magnificent charlatan Jakub Frank (Jankiel Lejbowicz) which defected from Judaism and sought conversion to the Catholic faith. His wife Celina was of Frankist descent, and Mickiewicz's sense of a providential relationship between the two nations, Poles and Jews, became steadily stronger as he grew older. The cause of 'Israel, our elder brother' and the cause of Polish independence could not, he decided, be separately solved.
He always believed in full equality and civil rights for Jews. But for a long time, especially during the years when his mind was dominated by the mystic Towiariski (a much dingier charlatan than Frank), he assumed that the self-realisation of Jewry would be through conversion to Christianity. Later, he was able to shake off this notion of convergence, and look forward to a free Poland in which Jews and Poles would help one another to follow parallel destinies. 'Without the emancipation of the Jews, and the development of their spirit, Poland cannot rise. Should she rise without the emancipation of the Jews, which I do not believe, she certainly will not be able to maintain herself.
When he reached the camp at Burgas, he found that the troops included hundreds of Polish, Ukrainian and Russian Jews. As far away as Plymouth, where prisoners of war were kept in the Mill Bay gaol, Polish emissaries had already been recruiting anti-tsarist Jews to serve against Russia. Now Mickiewicz conceived a new vision. He would form the Jews into a separate legion within the Ottoman Cossack division: the 'Hussars of Israel'.
This plan took up the remaining weeks of the poet's life. The Polish exiles had long ago decided that the first step to the liberation of their country — the token to the oppressed millions at home that a free Poland already lived and fought - was the establishment of a Polish army abroad: the 'legionary idea'. Mickiewicz now applied this thought to the Jews. The Hussars of Israel would be a Jewish legion. His friend Armand Levy, an assimilated French Jew who had travelled with him to Turkey, told Turkish officials that 'we want to elevate ourselves as a race, and we believe that the best means ... is the submission of proof that we are not only as intelligent but also as brave as the others'.
The creation of the Hussars and their victories in battle would not only announce to the world that the Jewish nation had broken away from the ancient Gentile caricature of egotism and servility; it would also electrify and transform the Jewish masses throughout the Russian Empire. And, as Mickiewicz put it, the Christian peasantry would follow the Jewish example. 'We shall spread like lava with our continually growing legion, from synagogue to synagogue, village to village, into the very depths of Poland and Lithuania.'
For a time, the Hussars of Israel seemed to be possible. Sadyk Pasha agreed to a proposal from Mickiewicz that a synagogue should be opened in the camp, and that Jewish soldiers should have Saturdays off during training. Lieutenant Michal Horenstein designed a fine uniform for the Hussars and wore it about Burgas, to the delight of Mickiewicz. But, behind the poet's back, Sadyk grew satirical. He had no doubts about the fighting qualities of Jewish troops; at the capture of Bucharest the year before, Jewish soldiers had done well and later — after the death of Mickiewicz — they fought bravely under his command outside Sevastopol. He also calculated that the project would help to raise money for the Polish cause from the Jewish financial world, and he wrote letters and reports criticising 'the ridiculous yet factually existing prejudice against a Jewish army'. But he could foresee what Turkish objections would arise, above all the fear that a Jewish legion might turn its energies away from Russia and towards Palestine, still an Ottoman province. And Sadylc himself was not free of racial and religious prejudice.
In the end, they quarrelled. Sadyk told Mickiewicz that 'an army with separate Jewish and Ukrainian units under the leadership of a Polish nobleman is unthinkable. It would be a freak.' Mickiewicz went angrily back to Istanbul and his dank room in Pera at the end of October 1855, and tried to revive the Hussars of Israel at meetings with Turkish officials, Jewish dignitaries and foreign diplomats. He continued to see Ludwika but even she, in spite of all her affection for him, found it hard to take his plans seriously. Unwisely, she read to him a letter from her husband at Burgas in which he referred casually to 'scurvy Jews'. The poet was appalled. After his death, she wrote to Sadyk: 'Perhaps Mickiewicz's origin, or that of his family or wife, was [Jewish], for where did such love for Israel come from? I never thought about it until I read him your letter and came to the "scurvy Jew" bit; how he trembled, how excited he was! I don't know whether it is possible to love strange things so much, but perhaps he was in love with his own idea, wishes and thoughts.'
In Istanbul, it began to rain. Among the sick and wounded of the Allied armies, who crowded the streets or lay in hospital, cholera broke out. On the Asian side of the Bosporus, Florence Nightingale struggled to hold back the epidemic in the wards at Scutari. On the European side, one morning in late November, Adam Mickiewicz felt suddenly sick and giddy. He drank coffee and smoked a pipe, and felt a little better. Horenstein and a friend came to see him, in their sleek grey Hussars of Israel tunics, and talked about the war news and the gossip from Burgas. Then, when they had gone, the first violent stomach cramps began.