Orientalism à la Polonaise: The Polish History Behind Eastern Studies in Russia

chinczyk_i_europejczyk_-_typy_komediowe.jpg, default, Aleksander Orłowski, "The Chinese and the European", Photo: National Museum in Warsaw.

#language & literature

A look at the early days of Oriental Studies in Poland (as well as Russia) with the spotlight being on the trailblazing academic centre in Vilnius – where a group of young students, colleagues of Adam Mickiewicz, set course for a new approach to the science of the East.

The East… but where and what is this ‘East’? In early 19th-century Eastern Europe, in what was then a freshly partitioned Poland, a group of students at the University of Vilnius engaged passionately in studying oriental languages and cultures (just as in parallel they engaged in underground political activity). Although the university was closed shortly after – and the students found themselves arrested and deported – their interests and future scholarship impacted not only the new discipline of Oriental Studies in Russia (and the West), but it also influenced the character of Polish Romantic poetry. How did these young men become interested in Eastern languages? How did their unique encounter with the oriental ‘Other’ play out? Lastly, what does Adam Mickiewicz have to do with it all?

Imperial Vilnius University & the East

Thumbnail — Vilnius University as represented in Józef Bieliński's book "Uniwersytet Wileński: 1579-1831", T. 1, Kraków, 1899-1900, photo: Biblioteka Narodowa Polona

Our story – and really, it’s the story of modern Poland’s interest in Eastern cultures and languages – starts in the early 19th century at the Vilnius University, an important Polish academic centre with a tradition going back to the Jesuit Academy, founded in 1579 by King Stefan Batory. In 1803, following a hiatus resulting from the partitions and the dissolution of the Polish state, the university was re-opened with ‘the kind permission of Emperor Alexander I’ under the name Imperial Vilnius University. For the next quarter of a century, it remained the largest academic centre in the Russian Empire and, perhaps more importantly, a hotbed for all things oriental.

The idea of inspiring oriental passions in Vilnius students is often credited to the German-born professor Gotfryd Ernest Groddeck. Groddeck – who was a professor of Greek and Latin – was able to instil oriental passions not only in his students, like Józef Sękowski, but also fellow university professors, including Joachim Lelewel. The latter, himself a brilliant historian with a broad range of interests, went on to learn Arabic and became the author of a significant, pioneering work in Arabian geography. Throughout the 1820s, oriental languages in Vilnius were also taught by professors Wilhelm Munich and Szymon Żukowski.

For Lelewel, but also for the other professors (and students) of the Vilnius University, Asia was the cradle of European nations and humankind as a whole. It was to the East, Lelewel argued in sync with the Zeitgeist of the era, that Europe should trace ‘its blood, speech, ideas, as well as rational perceptions’. Hence the Romantic interest in Eastern languages and cultures was also part of a bigger modern project in search of the sources and identity of European nations. Students were encouraged to study oriental languages and literatures: Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Chalcedonic, and of course, Hebrew.

This fruitful period in the history of the Vilnius University came to an end in 1832, when the Russian authorities closed the university in the aftermath of the November Uprising. But even earlier, its scholarly life was shaken by police investigations into circles of Polish patriotic youth. One of these, known as the trial of the Philomaths of 1822, resulted in a massive arrest of students, many of whom, like Adam Mickiewicz, Aleksander Chodźko and Józef Kowalewski, were later deported to Russia. Faced with the grim prospect of deportation, many of them were now considering an academic career… in Oriental Studies. For others, choosing the oriental path was more ‘organic’. Either way, all the roads seemed to lead to the East – and Russia was on the way.

Sękowski, the Orientalist

Perhaps the most brilliant ‘orientalist’ to emerge from the Vilnius University was Józef Sękowski (1800-1858), or Osip Senkovsky, as he is known in Russia. Sękowski attended schools in Minsk, before – much ahead of his age, and at the instigation of his uncle Groddeck – he transferred to Vilnius University. Already as a student he became the author of the first printed translations from Arabic into Polish, publishing Luqman’s fables (1818).

In 1819, upon finishing his studies in Vilnius, Sękowski embarked on a journey to the East (on a Vilnius University stipend), taking him to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Nubia and Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia). Sękowski returned to Vilnius in 1821, but shortly thereafter moved to Petersburg where his dazzling knowledge of Eastern languages earned him a tenure position of the professor of Turkish and Arabic languages at the newly established Petersburg University – a position he would hold for the next 25 years.

Sękowski wrote over 440 scholarly papers during his time at the university. Perhaps of biggest historical relevance for the wider public were his original translations of Eastern tales. One of them, Vityaz’ bulanogo konya, earned praise from Pushkin himself. During his tenure, Sękowski attempted to create an Eastern Languages department at the Petersburg University, but his vision of the reform was rejected. In fact, it was implemented only a couple years after he retired. His tenure left Russian oriental studies in good shape, and his students included, among others, such fellow Poles from the Vilnius University: Aleksander Chodźko, Augustyn Żaba, Józef Kowalewski and Antoni Muchliński. The latter took over the department after Sękowski’s leave.

Aleksander Orłowski - Oriental Painting [gallery]

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

Mickiewicz reads Sękowski

A versatile scholar, Sękowski ended his academic career somewhat prematurely – in 1847. He pursued a literary path, becoming instead a popular – if not also notorious – writer (most notably the author of The Fantastic Journeys of Baron Brambeus), journalist as well as editor-in-chief of several magazines. The historians see his scholarly role in ‘propagating and consolidating the oriental current within Russian literature’.

Sękowski certainly played a role in influencing the oriental interests of Adam Mickiewicz, whose own takes on Eastern and Arabic works were often mediated in Sękowski’s scholarship and translation work. These include poems like Almotenabbi (1829), Szanfary (1829) as well as Asine and Dog (based on a Luqman fable), all of which bear traces of Sękowski’s professional interests. As the footnotes to Mickiewicz’s breakthrough Crimean Sonnets (1826) clearly show, Mickiewicz’s knowledge of Eastern and Muslim cultures of Crimea was also much indebted to his former Vilnius University colleague.

The poetic fruit borne out of Mickiewicz’s relationship with Sękowski turned out to be much more lasting than their friendship. Around the time of the publication of the Crimean Sonnets, Mickiewicz and Sękowski had a falling out. This was largely due to Sekowski’s growing resentment towards Poles and his loyalty to Russian authorities (he was a proponent of the Russification of Polish schools), which some Poles claimed bordered on cynicism or straight nihilism.

Hafez, or the Persian Muse of the Romantics

The young Sękowski was also one of the first scholars to bring Polish readers the poetry of the classic Persian author Hafez. While ‘Polish’ interest in this Persian poet dates back to the 17th century (the earliest European translation of Hafez’s ghazals, into Latin, is the work of one Meninski), it was Sękowski who came up with the first Polish translation.

The work came out in 1820 in Vilnius and was the fruit of Sękowski’s travel to the East (as the postscript states, it was completed in Pera, district of Constantinople, in January 1820). To convey Hafez into Polish, Sękowski made ample use of the available Turkish commentaries, including one by Sudi. As the 20th century Polish orientalist Ananiasz Zajączkowski argues, ‘these attempts of translating Hafez using Sudi’s commentary and translation predated […] the research of European scholars by at least 30 years.’

According to Zajączkowsk, Sękowski had a pioneering approach with regards to the more general understanding and interpretation of Hafez’s poetry. At a time when many interpreters saw Hafez as a ‘mystical’ author, and considered his love poems as allegory poems, Sękowski quite reasonably assumed that this ‘mysticism’ was first and foremost a matter of his ‘literary form’.

Wiernikowski & ‘the buttocks of his intentions’

However, it wasn’t until over a decade later that Hafez’s songs were translated for the first time into Polish as verse. Unsurprisingly, the translator was another of Mickiewicz’s Vilnius University colleagues – Jan Wiernikowski (1800-1877). A close friend of Mickiewicz’s (dubbed by the poet his ‘Parnassian brother’) and like him, also a victim of the police crack-down on the Filomaths circle, Wiernikowski was deported in 1824 to Simbirsk (the European part of Russia). There, he worked as a teacher of ancient languages at a secondary school before moving to Kazan to study oriental languages (Arabic). He became a professor at the Department of Oriental Languages of that university before being ultimately sacked in 1834 for showing support for anti-Russian political events in the ‘Northern-Western Lands’ (as the former Poland's Eastern territories were officially called).

Translating Hafez was a long-term project for Wiernikowski (five songs were eventually published only in 1838, in Vilnius), as he was also a translator from Greek (Pindarus) and Latin as well as from Hebrew (the Psalms) and Swedish (Frytjof, Aksel). Mickiewicz – who was well aware of the amount of consistency and stamina such an ‘oriental’ task required (as well as he was aware of the imperfections of his friend’s character) – wrote about this, in a jocular fashion, to their common friend from the Vilnius-era, also a linguist, Józef Kowalewski.

‘One needs, my dear Józef, and I’ll phrase this in a manner both Oriental and Lithuanian, to thrust a sharp stick of coercion into the buttocks of his intentions’.

As Ananiasz Zajączkowski claims, translating a Persian poet at the time was far from an innocent aesthetic decision; for Wiernikowski’s contemporaries it was much more a clear sign of the ‘betrayal of classicist ideals’ and an act of allegiance to the Romantic movement in literature.

Aleksander Orłowski - Oriental motifs in his drawings [gallery]

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

Spitznagel, a polyglot wunderkind

The same scholar also noted that ‘the literary interest in Persian poetry had oftentimes coincided with the most tragic events in the lives of Polish Romantic authors’. A case in point was Ludwik Spitznagel (1806-1827) – a genius polyglot (he knew 15 languages), poet and orientalist. Spitznagel was a close friend of another Polish Romantic poet and fellow Vilnius University student, Juliusz Słowacki (as well as a teacher of oriental languages to the older Adam Mickiewicz).

After his studies in Vilnius, Spitznagel, who was three years older than Słowacki, went on to study oriental languages in Petersburg, where he took on Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and Chaldaic. His translations from that period include Szanfary, that is Al-Shanfarā (an all-time favourite with the Polish romantics, translated also by Słowacki, Mickiewicz and Sękowski), as well as Inskandername, a 12th-century poem about Alexander the Great by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi.

Spitznagel worked at Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1826. In January 1827, just a day before he was supposed to leave for Egypt where he had been appointed as a dragoman (a diplomatic official and translator) at the Russian consulate in Alexandria, Spitznagel committed suicide at the manor of a mate from school. The exact reasons for his death were never fully explained, but it’s clear that he was a sensitive person prone to depressive moods.

Death by a Rose

While some scholars suggested the reasons had to do with Spitznagel’s alleged clandestine activities (according to one theory, Spitznagel’s diplomatic tasks included a secret mission of supporting the Greek insurrection against the Turks, the Turks being Russia’s archenemy at the time), others pointed to a more practical, and ‘Romantic’, explanation. According to the latter hypothesis, the reasons behind Spitznagel’s drastic decisions were connected to an unrequited love for a woman. Moreover, it all had to do with… a rose... ‘which Spitznagel’s beloved decided to bury in a vase instead of offering it to the young man’. This seemingly banal misunderstanding with some truly tragic consequences supposedly owed much to the symbolism of roses in Spitznagel’s life – and in Persian poetry.

Among the papers found in Spitznagel’s trove upon his death, there was a card written in Persian in the young man’s hand with a two-verse poem in the style of Hafez (the exact authorship, however, was never established). The Polish translation underneath said: ‘'If it is a rose you want to see, look at your face, / If it is autumn you want to see, look into my soul’’.

Scholars underline Spitznagel’s role as being one of the initiators of orientalist interests in the Vilnius circle. He was, among others, an important influence on Słowacki’s ‘Eastern’ works. Apart from Al-Shanfara, these include the poems Mnich [‘The Monk’], Arab and Ojciec zadżumionych [‘The Father of The Plague-Stricken’]). Spitznagel – who was only 21 when he shot himself – was immortalised in the poem Godzina myśli (‘An Hour of Thought’) by his friend Juliusz Słowacki.

Aleksander Chodźko, ‘an exquisite Iranologist’

A winded orientalist career in Persian studies was to become the lot for another former student of the Vilnius University, Aleksander Chodźko. Born on Belarusian soil (Minsk region), he was imprisoned in 1823 for his activity in the Filaret circle. Luckily, he was able to continue his studies at the Oriental Institute of the Petersburg University. One of the letters by an enthusiastic Mickiewicz to the fledgling Orientalist Chodźko from that period includes the line: ‘My beloved dervish, Allah ekbir, God is great!’

In 1830, Chodźko entered the Russian diplomatic service and was sent to Persia, where he spent the next 11 years serving as a translator and interpreter at the Russian diplomatic missions in Tabrīz and Tehran and as consul in Rašt on the Caspian Sea. Most of the source materials that he would later publish came from this period, which for Chodźko, however, was a difficult and problematic one: ‘Sooner or later I will quit without any regrets; I’ve served the Devil for so many years, now it’s time to serve God and one’s conscience,’ he wrote to Mickiewicz.

In 1842, Chodźko eventually settled in Paris and a few years later he resigned from the Russian diplomatic service. In the same year in London, he published his first book under the title, Specimens of the Popular Poetry of Persia…, which featured unique materials sourced in Persia throughout the previous decade. Among these were songs about Kurroglu, a little known (at least to Western science of the time) legendary Turkmeni poet of the Tuka (Teke) tribe. As Chodźko wrote, this great poet of northern Khorasan [a historical region east of the Caspian Sea] ‘could be properly called the Ottoman Mazepa of the Turkic nomadic tribes in Persia; especially since Mazepa too was a poet’. In calling Kurroglu a Mazepa (Ivan Mazepa was a 17th-century Ukrainian political leader, whose life became an inspiration for many Western literary works, including one by George Byron), Chodźko was obviously drawing parallels with the ‘East’ he knew from his home – a multi-cultural history of Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The book also contained other unique material sourced by Chodźko in central Asia and the Middle East, among them, songs of the Tatars (taken down in Astrakhan in 1830) as well as those of the Kalmuk people of the Volga area, additional Turkmen songs, and much more.

Derar, or the Eastern Cassida in Polish

Chodźko went on to publish other academic works, mostly in the field of Persian theatre, language (popular and pioneering Persian grammar) and folk literature, along works on Kurdish dialects. Despite the fact that he never held an academic post in Oriental Studies, he was held in high regard in academic circles, becoming a member of the most prestigious scientific societies and institutions of the time as well as publishing in some of the most acclaimed French oriental periodicals, e.g. Revue de l’Orient.

Chodźko, who was also a gifted poet, introduced Eastern themes and poetic diction into his Polish poetry. The most notable example was his longer narrative poem called Derar, subtitled Eastern Tale in Two Cassidas – it was directly inspired by Arabic poetry, but it also included motifs and paraphrases from Turkish and Persian poetry. Published in Petersburg in 1829, it was dedicated to Adam Mickiewicz. As scholar Renata Gadamska-Serafin writes, the poem as well as Chodźko’s translations from Persian literature ‘resulted in an increased interest in Iranian culture in Poland and contributed to the development of Iranian studies in Poland’.

Kowalewski & the great Mongolian dictionary

But the list of the Vilnius University students turned professors of Oriental Studies at Russian Universities doesn’t end here. Another of Mickiewicz’s colleagues to pursue an academic career in Russia was Józef Kowalewski. Arrested with Mickiewicz in the aftermath of the Philomath conspiracy, and while still on trial, he decided to pursue oriental studies in Russia. This was met with a positive response from authorities and Kowalewski was deported to Kazan, with a simultaneous order to enroll in Oriental Studies.

In Kazan, the old Tatar city and one-time capital of the Tatar Khanate of Kazan – which at that time was, along with Petersburg, the most important academic centre for Eastern languages in the empire – Kowalewski studied Arabic and Persian as well as the Tatar language. In 1828, he embarked on a five-year long journey around the Buryatia region and China, studying Mongolian, Chinese as well as Lamaism.

In 1833, back in Kazan he founded and became the head of the first university department of Mongolian Studies, not only in Russia, but also in all of Eurasia. He became one of the first European scholars of the Mongolian language, author of the Mongolian Chrestomathy (1836-1837) and the Mongolian-Russian-French Dictionary (1844-1849).

In the 1840s and 1850s, Kowalewski was repeatedly appointed the dean and even the rector of Kazan University. This academic activity had an obvious political aspect, as it inevitably contributed to consolidating Russian authority. Also upon his return to Poland in 1862, Kowalewski remained a loyal citizen of the Russian state: he did not take part in the January Uprising and was later at the helm of the further russification of Warsaw University.

Zan & Suzin among the Bashkirs and Kyrgizis

Indeed, making a diplomatic or academic career in the Russian Empire came at a price. It meant that these Polish ex-deportees were now part of the Russian imperial project, operating as cogs in a much larger colonial machine, which in the 19th century was much engaged in waging wars and grabbing land from indigenous peoples all over its ever-expanding edges. In this light, studying Oriental cultures and languages was just as much about getting to know the Other as about trying to subjugate and exploit them.

The successful careers of Sękowski, Kowalewski, Chodźko and others, certainly equivocal from the Polish patriotic point of view, can be seen as a flip side to the more tragic life trajectories of other talented students of the Vilnius University and fellow philomaths. But even for the most unfortunate of them, like Adam Suzin, Tomasz Zan or Jan Czeczot – all of whom received severe prison terms and eventually spent many years in southern Russia – deportation offered the chance for a close and often fruitful encounter with the local Other.

For Zan and Suzin, who spent many years in the steppes around Orenburg and in the Ural Mountains, this meant close contact with the Bashkir, Kirgiz, and Kazakh tribes. Suzin, who travelled in the Kazakh steppes, described in his memoirs the lives, customs and religion of the local folk. Allegedly, he felt very well among ‘his nomad friends’. Zan, who became a geologist and explorer of the Ural Mountains and was also the founder of a museum of natural science in Orenburg, left notes from his travels in the Kyrgyzstan steppe. These included original folk material, the poetic improvisations of nomads along with information about the Kyrgyz poet and singer Guibal. Zan was even considering writing a longer poem set in the Kyrgyzstan steppes, its hero: Abdragan Mulla.

According to Polish literary scholar Jerzy Borowczyk, this marginal quasi-ethnographic chunk of Zan’s and Suzin’s output can be seen as ‘the original birth-place of the Kyrgyz text within the frame of Polish “deportee literature”. Its subsequent chapters would be written by the deported in the 1830s and 1840s – Zieliński and Januszkiewicz’.

Witkiewicz, or Afghanistan & Beyond

But it is the life of Jan Witkiewicz (1808-1839) that offers perhaps the most unequivocal and ultimately tragic version of a Polish ‘orientalist’s’ life in Russia. Not a proper Philomath (he was almost ten years younger than Mickiewicz), Witkiewicz was arrested while a pupil at the secondary school in Kroże (the Samogitia region, today’s Lithuania). Witkiewicz, 15 at the time, received a death sentence for plotting a conspiracy, but the sentence was later changed and the boy was deported to Orsk, near Orenburg, where he was then conscripted into the Russian army.

Despite difficult conditions and limited freedom, Witkiewicz was over time able to make excursions into the Kazakhstan steppes, which enabled him to get to know the languages of local tribes along with their traditions and rites. He displayed truly phenomenal linguistic talents: he mastered Persian, Arabic, Pashto and many other languages (according to some sources he came to know 19 languages). These talents, in addition to the support of Alexander von Humboldt (whom he met in 1829), eventually earned him an exemption from military service.

Witkiewicz made a brilliant career, serving as an unofficial envoy in the Russian Central Asian frontier, infiltrating Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. His cordial relations with members of the local tribes and its rulers (he was called by them ‘the Batyr’) opened many doors for the Russian Empire. But his independent politics eventually set Russia on a potential collision course with the British Empire, which also had its interests in the region. This led to Witkiewicz being brought back to Petersburg where he, allegedly, committed suicide in May of 1839.

The many mysteries surrounding Witkiewicz’s life and death – and especially his unclear motives – led Maria Janion to call him ‘the only real Wallenrod’. The latter was a literary figure, conceived by Adam Mickiewicz in the eponymous poem from 1829: an avenger in the service of an archenemy who rises to the top ranks of power only to covertly bring down the state. This literary figure, with all the moral dilemmas and consequences it entailed, was hugely influential with Polish patriotic youth trying to position itself in relation to the Russian Empire, but as Janion argued, it was Jan Witkiewicz who came to embody the literary model in its tragic entirety.

Orientalism in Polish Painting at Pera Museum - Selected Works

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

The Legacy of Polish Orientalism: from Kurdistan to the Abbasids

The list of Poles who have made brilliant careers in Oriental Studies in Russia (and elsewhere) doesn’t end with the Philomath circle. Let’s just list the most important names, along with their most significant accomplishments – to be continued throughout future generations.

August Kościesza-Żaba – born in Krasław (today’s Latvia), Żaba (1802-1896) studied in Petersburg before working as a translator in Russian consulates in Jaffa, Salonicae and Smyrna. In 1848 to 1866, he was the Russian consul in Erzurum (today’s southern Turkey), where he conducted research in the local culture of the Kurds. The results of this work were published in French as Receueil des notices et récits de la littérature et des tribus du Kourdistan (1861). Żaba was also the author of the first French-Kurdi dictionary (1879). Both published under the name A. de Jaba (Alexandre / Auguste). Żaba (vel Jaba vel Жаба) died in Smyrna having collected one on the greatest collection of Eastern materials.
Ignacy Pietraszewski – another alumnus of Vilnius University, Pietraszewski (1796-1869) was the student of Professor Wilhelm Munich (Persian and Arabic). He continued his studies in Petersburg with Sękowski, and later worked as dragoman in the Russian Embassy in Constantinople, after which he travelled extensively in the East (leaving a memoir of these travels). He wrote several papers, mostly in the field of Turkish philology and numismatics. His most important translation work is The Fables of Bidpai from Persian, published in Leipzig in 1855. His scholarship with regard to Zendavesta’s alleged Slavic origin has been ridiculed.
Aleksander Szemiot – another alumnus of the Petersburg University Szemiot, went on to become a professor at Warsaw University. He was the author of Historia rerum Abassidarum as well as the author of the Russian translation of Abulfart’s Voyages.
Antoni Muchliński (1808-1862) – the already mentioned scholar studied in Kazan and Petersburg, where he replaced Sękowski as professor. Muchliński specialised in Turkish and Arabic as well as Egyptian history. His contribution to the field of Polish-Lithuanian Tatar Studies has been indispensable.

The Polish modern encounter with the East, which played out across the vast Russian Empire in the first half of the 19th century, would continue in the generations to come. In the second half of 19th century, this would include pioneering work by such ethnographers and linguists as Edward Piekarski and Wacław Sieroszewski (with regard to Yakutian tribes), and Bronisław Piłsudski (the Ainu people), to name just a few. Still, its Romantic beginnings remain one of the truly fascinating and still little-known adventures in the history of Oriental Studies.

Written by Mikołaj Gliński, May 2022.

Sources: Marek M. Dziekan, Polacy a świat arabski, 1998; 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; Maria Janion, "Życie pośmiertne Konrada Wallenroda", 1990.

Language English

Secret Polish Histories

Romanticism