Adam Mickiewicz’s Eastern Face

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The story of Poland’s greatest poet’s complex relationship and remarkable openness to the Middle East – from formative childhood experiences in his multi-ethnic homeland, to his death in Constantinople. And all things ‘Oriental’ in between.

In the autumn of 1855, towards the end of his tumultuous life, Adam Mickiewicz set out on his last voyage, travelling from Paris to Constantinople. One of the things he had with him was an Eastern-style tent and a Turkish language textbook. It was also in the Turkish Arabic script, a couple weeks later, that he wrote what turned out to be some of the last notes he ever made. He passed away in the Ottoman capital that November.

But that final Eastern voyage was in many ways only a logical fulfilment of Mickiewicz’s complicated life-long relationship with the multi-faceted ‘East’. This relationship actually started in his Eastern European homeland and continued throughout his life, materialising in the young man’s personal interests and a series of poetic works, from The Crimean Sonnets to Farys and The Renegade.

Let’s take a look at how the influence of the Middle East on Poland’s greatest poet far transcended that of literary Romantic fads of the era. How it became an aspect of his own identity, impacting the poet’s understanding of his own cultural background as well as his sense of what it means to be ‘at home’. Here’s the story of how Adam Mickiewicz turned to the East only to discover a chunk of home.

Before we start, it’s important to note the meaning of the term ‘the Orient’ in the 19th century. Today this might refer to any part of Asia depending on who one is talking to, and can be considered outdated and even offensive. For Mickiewicz, Oriental ideas and objects came from what we would today call the Middle East and Turkey, much of which was controlled at the time by the Ottoman Empire.

Prelude, or the Orient at home

Thumbnail — A Tatar mosque in Adam Mickiewicz's hometown of Nowogródek (Navahrudak) in interwar Poland, 1931. Photo: Wikimedia.org

But how did this whole thing start? Where should one look for the earliest experience of the ‘East’ in the life of Adam Mickiewicz, a poet from a backwater province in Eastern Europe, whose life trajectory took him all around the continent (and eventually beyond it)? How does this ‘East’ tap into the story of a turbulent life mostly spent in emigration in Western Europe? What spurred his interests in the Orient and what enabled him to embrace them so readily and engage with them so fruitfully? Well, as is often the case, it all started at home.

Adam Mickiewicz was born and brought up in the area of what is today Belarus but which historically formed part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and which just a few years prior to his birth was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This was an area with some truly remarkable and highly unique multi-ethnic traditions. In the case of Mickiewicz’s hometown of Nowogródek (today Navahrudak, in Belarus), this multi-cultural mix included Jews (who made up 46% of the town’s population), Muslim Tatars, Catholic Poles, and Orthodox and Uniate Belarusians. In fact, at Mickiewicz’s time, Christain denominations amounted to only 29% of the entire population of the town.

The Tatars in particular, who derived from Turkic ethnic groups that once lived in the vast Golden Horde khanate (it spanned huge territories in Central Asia and Eastern Europe) must have been an important element of the ‘Oriental’ landscape of Mickiewicz’s childhood. Known as the Lipka Tatars, they lived in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania since the Mediaeval era (they settled there during the bellicose reign of Duke Vytautas in the 14th century) and for centuries made up the only inclusive Muslim minority living in Europe. In Mickiewicz’s day, the Tatars, who had long since renounced their language and spoke either Belarusian or Polish, made up some 20% of his hometown’s population. Their wooden mosque (with liturgy performed in Arabic) was located in Tatarska Street – just five minutes away from Mickiewicz’s family home.

Another Tatar community with a mosque and mizar (a Muslim cemetery), was in nearby Lovchitsy just 7 kilometres away. Other Tatar communities were scattered further north, most notably in the Vilnius region, as well as in the Polish Podlasie region to the west. All of them were part of the same Tatar population, centuries-old and very-well integrated into the fabric of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s society.

Mosques and kenesas of the former Polish Commonwealth [gallery]

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But Mickiewicz’s ‘East at home’ would stretch even further to include pockets of the Karaite population. This Turkic-speaking ethnicity, adherents of their own variety of Judaism, was largely a scientific mystery at the time of Mickiewicz. They spoke their own language (Kipchak!) and had their own rites performed in houses of worship known as kenesas. They formed large communities in Trakai and Vilnius, but also in parts of Ukraine (as well as Crimea).

The presence of these ‘Eastern’ minorities, along with that of the Jews – perhaps the most important ethnographic ‘Other’ in this region (speaking Yiddish, and mostly living in shtetls) – combined for a complicated and diverse social make-up that was far from monolithic. Rather than exotic supplement, this eastern presence was most probably a self-evident and inalienable core element of the young Mickiewicz’s world. As such, it may be seen as an important prelude to Mickiewicz’s future encounters with the East.

The student Adam Mickiewicz

These encounters would take on a new form in 1815 when Mickiewicz moved to Vilnius. He went to study at the Imperial University of Vilnius, an important Polish academic centre with a tradition going back to the Jesuit academy founded in 1579 by King Stefan Batory. In Mickiewicz’s day, the university, which re-opened in 1803 with ‘the kind permission of Emperor Alexander I’, was not only the largest academic centre in the Russian partition, but also in the whole Russian Empire.

Much in keeping with the Zeitgeist of the modern era in Europe, Mickiewicz and his fellow students were able to study Oriental languages and cultures. These topics were taught by esteemed professors such as Gotfryd Ernest Grodeck (who was also Mickiewicz’s thesis advisor), Wilhem Munnich, Szymon Żukowski and Joachim Lelewel. The latter also became Mickiewicz’s mentor and longtime friend, as well as the author of an important pioneering work on Arabian geography.

But in the case of Lelewel and his students in Vilnius, the legendary East was also surprisingly close to home. In the 1820s, Lelewel became the spiritus movens behind the Vilnius-based Polish translation of the Quran (from the French). The translation was prepared for the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars, who were by now unable to understand their most holy books. These were the same Tatars that Mickiewicz would meet on the streets of his hometown.

This fruitful and carefree period in the lives of Mickiewicz and his university colleagues ended quite drastically in the summer of 1823. The young poet, along with many of his friends, found himself arrested and then, in the aftermath of an investigation by the Russian authorities and the so-called trial of the Philomaths, was deported to Russia. It was around this time that Mickiewicz, just like some of his closest friends Aleksander Chodźko and Józef Kowalewski, was considering an academic career… in Oriental studies at Kazan University. The Russian Empire, at the height of its imperial expansion and colonial aspirations, was urgently in need of all kinds of specialists – and these young, perfectly educated Poles were probably better equipped to take on this role than anyone across the vast Empire.

A Pole in Crimea

In 1824, Mickiewicz found himself in St. Petersburg, where, as he later recalled: ‘I threw myself into Eastern languages; but barely had I started spelling, when I was forced to sit back on a sleigh again.’ That ‘sleigh trip’ took him to Odessa and later, in the summer of 1825, to Crimea. The poetic fruit of that expedition, a book of poems called The Crimean Sonnets, to a large extent changed the trajectory of Polish poetry, opening it up to the ‘Oriental treasures’ of the East.

In Crimea, where he spent almost two months, Mickiewicz found himself surrounded by a new and fascinating cultural and natural landscape (the Crimean mountains rising from the Black Sea, with the imposing Chatyr-Dag massif, is one of the powerful poetic images found in the sonnets). But this landscape was also studded with traces and reminiscences of past civilisations, from layers of Greek and Roman, to Genoese, to Tatar and Turkish.

As these poems clearly show, Mickiewicz was enthralled by the legacy of the Crimean Khanate, a once powerful state run by the Crimean Tatar khans, which for centuries had retained close political relations with the Polish-Lithiuanian Commonwealth (and Polish Tatars). In 1783, the khanate eventually fell prey to the Russian Empire, a historical fact which for Mickiewicz must have been a striking parallel to the fate of his own homeland, partitioned finally and fully in 1795 by that same enemy, just four years prior to the poet’s birth.

Travelling around Crimea, Mickiewicz was constantly stumbling upon fresh remnants of the bygone glory of the Crimean Khans, most notably in the ancient Tatar capital of Bakhchysarai (the town comes up in no less than four poems) with its landmark Han Saray palace. The depictions of these symbolic places, with their Oriental Muslim architecture and Tatar inhabitants, are at the heart of many of these poems.

Text

From out the mosques the pious wend their way;
⁠Muezzin voices tremble through the night;
Within the sky the pallid King of Light
⁠Wraps silvered ermine round him while he may,
And Heaven's harem greets its star array.

Author

‘Sonnet No 7: Baktschi Serai by Night’ by Adam Mickiewicz, trans. Edna W. Underwood

Tatars, Karaites & the East in miniature

But travelling around Crimea, Mickiewicz was also inevitably bound to make some even more unexpected and truly serendipitous discoveries, which again and again would point him toward his cultural background back home. In Eupatoria (Tatar: Keslev), for one, Mickiewicz, who was travelling with his friend Henryk Rzewuski, was hosted by a prominent member of the Crimea’s Karaite community, one Babovich. As we learn from one of Rzewuski’s letters, it was here that the two Poles met Hazzan Yashar. Yashar was their host’s close collaborator who – to the great surprise of the travellers – knew Polish and had even translated poems by the Polish 18th-century classic writer Stanisław Trembecki (into Hebrew, for that!). As it turned out, the man was born in the Lviv area and spent his early life in Lutsk – one of the seats of the Karaite Ukrainian community.

As Rzewuski recalled, ‘Mickiewicz would improvise for him a few stanzas about tolerance, which left the priest enchanted - and so we became friends; nothing binds people more than misfortune and scholarship.’

Mickiewicz would make further encounters with the legacy of Karaite culture in Crimea, when he travelled to Chufut-Kale, a mediaeval fortress and a historical centre for Crimean Karaites, not far from Bakhchysarai. The memory of that trip is preserved in the fifteenth sonnet of the series.

Mickiewicz himself summed up his Crimean stay in a letter to Lelewel:

I trod the clouds of the Chatyr-Dag [...]. I slept on the divans of the Girais and played chess in a laurel garden with the late khan’s steward. I’ve seen the East in miniature.

Mickiewicz, the Crimean Poet

But the eighteen pieces of The Crimean Sonnets, which Mickiewicz published in 1826 in Moscow, were chock full of not only exotic landscapes but also ‘Oriental’ hyperbolic diction (those bold metaphors!!) and a myriad of exotic eastern words. Mickiewicz was actually the first author to introduce words from Turkish and Arabic to the Polish poetic vernacular, like Allach, izan, chylat, chalif, and namaz – and to have considered them as equally important poetic material.

This poetic practice was in fact quite shocking for many readers of the day. Some of the more conservatively inclined critics accused Mickiewicz’s sonnets of being ‘un-national’ and denounced his stance as pure madness. One critic was poet Kajetan Koźmian, who found everything in the book to be ‘ignominous, vile, dirty, and obscure; it may be Crimean, Turkish or Tatar, but it’s not Polish.’

Text

Mickiewicz is a half-wit released from a mental asylum, who defiant of all good taste and sense, and through a word tangle of incomprehensible language, blabbers incomprehensible and wild ideas...

Author

Kajetan Koźmian in a letter to F. Morawski, trans. MG

Koźmian was rhetorically asking whether it would now be obligatory ‘to go to Istanbul in order to learn the poet’s language’ and concluded his rant with another question: ‘What do all these Chatyr-Dags and Turkish renegades have in common with national poetry? German [poets] in their ballads sing at least of their own barons, we [instead] praise the Turks, Tatars and Cossacks – and in their own language, for that!’

Adam of Persia

But Mickiewicz was unflinching both in his resistance to criticism as well as in his literary interests. Writing to his Vilnius friend Józef Kowalewski, he said:

My dear Hodza Effendi, please do write to me how you like the Eastern Sonnets. You have to know that I’m about to venture into Oriental regions, I’m reading now the history of Persian literature and I have even translated from Persian six lines from Mirkhvand [a Persian historian]. From the original, that is.

Seen in this perspective, it comes as only a little surprise that when The Crimean Sonnets were published in 1826 in Moscow they were accompanied by… a Persian translation of one of the sonnets. The translation of the fifth sonnet (‘View of the Mountains from the Kozlov Steppes’) was prepared, on Mickiewicz’s instigation, by the poet’s friend Aleksander Chodźko and the Azerbaijani scholar Mirza Jaffar Topchy-Basha. Topchy-Basha, who was an adjunct professor at St. Petersburg University, also penned a Persian foreword to the collection, written in the characteristic ‘Oriental’ poetic style of exaggeration and luxuriousness. It would be hard not to see this Persian incrustation as a legitimate and very conscious move on Mickiewicz’s part to present the sonnets as the work of a truly ‘Oriental’ poet.

Mickiewicz’s Eastern muse

The Crimean Sonnets were not the only piece in Mickiewicz’s oeuvre bearing testimony to his Eastern inspirations. Mickiewicz was the author of several poems that were versions of Arabic works by classic poets of Arabic literature including Al-Shanfara, Al-Mutanabbi and Luqman (a little poem "Asine and Dog").

In 1828, he penned a longer narrative poem called Farys, inspired by the larger-than-life Romantic explorer, adventurer and Orientalist scholar Wacław Rzewuski. Translated into Arabic in 1910 (Cairo), it was often perceived by Arabic readers as an original work of Arabic literature – so excellent was Mickiewicz’s grasp of the ‘target’ literary culture.

Mickiewicz’s Persian forays included the little poem ‘Aryman and Oromaz’, based on a story from the Persian religious text known as The Avesta. His Turkish interests are perhaps most conspicuous in Giaur: Fragments of a Turkish Tale after Byron and The Renegade (subscripted: ‘The Turkish Ballade’).

It’s worth adding that many of these ‘Eastern inspirations’ were oftentimes spurred and mediated in the knowledge and scholarship provided by Mickiewicz’s friends from his Vilnius University years, many of whom became engaged in Oriental studies at Russian universities, like Józef Sękowski, Jan Wiernikowski and Aleksander Chodźko. As it turns out, the Orient was a guiding light for many of the young people from Mickiewicz’s university circle – for many it became an existential choice determining their whole lives.

Mickiewicz, ‘a Turkish writer’

The East refused to disappear from Mickiewicz’s life too. Already in 1830, as soon as he found himself out of Russia, Mickiewicz planned a trip to the East. In 1831, he wrote to his brother about a thwarted plan to embark a ship bound for Corfu and then Smyrna. As it would turn out, the great plan of a trip to the East would have to wait another quarter century. Mickiewicz spent the intervening years in Western Europe, mostly in Paris, engaging in the emancipatory movements of the period, actively taking part in key political events like the Spring of Nations in 1848.

But it was Turkey, or the Ottoman Empire as it was called in the day, that was to become the scene of the final chapter of Mickiewicz’s tumultuous life. Mickiewicz arrived in the Ottoman Empire shortly before his death in November 1855, to help form a Polish-Jewish military force to fight Russia in the Crimean War. During these last weeks of his life, the now 57-year-old Mickiewicz attempted to learn Turkish, which he did by studying Le Drogman Turc Donnant Les Mots Et Les Phrases, an innovative 1854 textbook on the Turkish language written by his old friend Aleksander Chodźko as an aid for French soldiers leaving for Turkey to take part in the Crimean War. As a result of this late interest, some of the last pages written by Mickiewicz before his death were effectively written in the Arabic-Turkish script. These pages contain Turkish words and phrases copied painstakingly in Turkish by Mickiewicz’s hand. In fact, one of these papers contains the manuscript of a letter he penned in Turkish to his old-time ‘Orientalist’ friend Aleksander Chodźko. (He wrote one in Persian too!). Here are its first lines, translated from Mickiewicz’s beginner’s Turkish:

Text

I want to write a letter to you in Turkish, but I can’t yet, therefore I’m very saddened. The Turkish language is seemingly very easy, but reading is very hard.

Author

Trans. MG

Wherever I pitch my tent...

Arriving in Constantinople, Mickiewicz also had with him an Eastern-style tent to sleep in, something he was already very fond of ahead of the trip. As one of his friends later recalled, Mickiewicz would have the tent set up in his Parisian apartment, and would sit inside it while conversing with guests. As one of them remembered, he once said with a smile:

Here and now I feel at home, I’m a real citizen, I have a roof of my own, and wherever I shall pitch my tent, at least this span of earth will belong to me. You’ll see that in the East I shall never dwell in a house, [but] I will always be at home.

In fact, the concepts of home and homeland, as well as the simple sense of feeling ‘at home’ somewhere, must have been something that kept returning to Mickiewicz over and over again. Ever since he was forced to leave Vilnius in 1823, at the age of 24, he never returned to his homeland (nor did he spend much time in what is today’s Poland). Throughout his life, Mickiewicz continued to re-define these elementary concepts, from the idea of the childhood home, the Lithuanian manor which he cherished in his memory, to the ‘furry Tatar burka’ which he supposedly bought in Bakhchysarai in Crimea, ‘which he was very fond of, and which served him as both garment and bedding’. And that Eastern tent, in which ‘here and now’ he felt at home.

In the last weeks of his life in Constantinople, Mickiewicz reportedly spent a lot of time walking around the Pera district where he lived. In fact, he felt quite ‘at home’ in its messy and noisy streets and bazaars, some of which he found ‘very similar to areas of my Lithuanian hometown’. The stay in the Ottoman capital would again and again offer throwbacks to his childhood years and his hometown.

Text

I have heard that in Smyrna there’s a supposed Grotto of Homer but I’m not curious about that! I was looking at something else. A pile of manure and rubbish was lying there, all the remnants together: manure, trash, slops, bones, broken pots, half a sole of an old slipper, some feathers – this I liked! Long did I stand there because it was just like the outside of an inn in Poland.

Author

As quoted in The History of Polish Literature by Czesław Miłosz

As it turns out, Mickiewicz who travelled far and wide, was inevitably bound to be reminded of the specific ‘Oriental’ character of his Eastern European homeland. As Małgorzata Litwinowicz notes, Mickiewicz’s trip to Constantinople can be seen as ‘a specific biographical fulfilment, a figure of return – not to the Lithuanian homeland, but to a place which belonged to that same circle of civilisation; a little town which was not pretty and which hardly resembled the reconstructed Paris’.

Much in the spirit of the Eastern nomadic peoples – the historical Tatars or the Arabs of the desert – he felt that his ultimate home was less about any particular geographical location, and much more about that tent – a roof over his head and that ‘span of earth’ beneath it.

A konfederatka or a fez

The same scholar, reflecting on the role of the Orient in Polish culture and Mickiewicz’s life, brings to attention the symbolic aspect of the most famous post-mortem photo of Mickiewicz. The poet is pictured as lying on his deathbed, and can be seen wearing a konfederatka hat – headgear traditionally associated with the Polish patriotic spirit and connected with a tradition of national uprisings. But, as Litwinowicz notes, among the things found in Mickiewicz’s belongings after his death, there was also a Turkish fez, a traditional Turkish hat, which he most likely acquired in the Ottoman capital.

Text

What would have happened if the greatest poet of the Poles had been buried wearing a fez, or more importantly, if he had been immortalised in such headgear? Reminding the Poles from then on of this part of their own culture, which they suppress with such extraordinary passion?

Author

Małgorzata Litwinowicz, "Wędrujący horyzont. Spostrzeżenia o miejscu Orientu w nowoczesnej kulturze polskiej", trans. MG

Mickiewicz’s lifetime relationship with the Orient is certainly proof of this part of his identity thriving unsuppressed – as well as testimony to his tremendous openness to ‘the Other’. Away from all the more colonialist Orientalist practices of his epoch, he was able to look in the face of the Orient unbiased. In it he recognised a part of himself, a part that he never lost, and one which was likely there with him from his earliest days back in Navahrudak.

Written by Mikołaj Gliński, April 2022

Sources: Ananiasz Zajączkowski, "Orient jako źródło inspiracji w literaturze romantycznej doby mickiewiczowskiej", Warszawa 1955; Ananiasz Zajączkowski, "Z dziejów orientalizmu polskiego doby mickiewiczowskiej," 1957; Jan Reychman, "Zainteresowania orientalistyczne w środowisku mickiewiczowskim w Wilnie i Petersburgu", 1957; Małgorzata Litwinowicz, "Wędrujący horyzont. Spostrzeżenia o miejscu Orientu w nowoczesnej kulturze polskiej".

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