The Tatar Crimean Sonnets: Resistance & Poetry in an Occupied Territory

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The Tatar Crimean Sonnets: Resistance & Poetry in an Occupied Territory

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Influence. Adam Mickiewicz - collage #5. A work by M.E. Andriolli was used. Author: Matej Kaniewski for Culture.pl

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When Adam Mickiewicz visited Crimea in 1825, it had already been under the rule of the Russian Empire for over forty years.

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Bakhchysarai on a painting by Carlo Bossoli, photo: Wikimedia

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Ukrainian Crimean poetry: ‘Captivity has ruled in this land’

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Lesya Ukrainka in Kiiv, 1896, photo: Wikimedia

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In the late nineteenth century, Mickiewicz’s Crimean Sonnets echoed unexpectedly in the work of Lesia Ukrainka, a modernist Ukrainian poet and a great patriot of her country.

Once power and captivity held sway,
The power is gone, all is but ruins –
Captivity rules on, to this day.”

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(Lesya Ukrainka, ’Bakhchysarai Palace’)

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As we can see, the poet even denies the Empire its might. Crucially, as in Mickiewicz, we come across no sign of a Russified Crimea in these works. We do see, however, as in ‘Tatar Girl’, brief glimpses of life of the Crimea’s native population.

The whole cycle is saturated with the conviction that this beautiful, sunny, ‘southern land’ is tainted with a profound, unspeakable sadness, whose source, we may suppose, lies in the history of its political captivity. This is why, in the final poem of the cycle, the figure of another foreign poet emerges, a stranger to the Crimea, an exile from his own culture and language who, in this joyful land, found only a ‘sad homestead’ – and death.

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Crimea in Yiddish & Hebrew

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Saul Tchernikhovsky, 1927, photo: Wikimedia.

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By the twentieth century, Mickiewicz’s work had exerted an influence on two other separate ‘Crimean’ cycles of poetry by Ukrainian-born authors, both of which were written in Jewish languages, in Hebrew and Yiddish.

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Allah is great! In the mouth of the renegade and of his Prophet
He commands a prayer – and a song in the mouth of the one whom he chooses!
Since the day on which the honour of Bakhchysarai was taken,
And since Moscow’s soldiers wave their swords over the fortress of the Crimea and its heights,
Silence has fallen upon the palace! [...]

Shaul Tchernichovsky, ‘III Sonnet’ [translated by Jörg Schulte]

In another poem from the series, we read about a voice resounding by night from a minaret next to the barracks: “it calls the names of the regiments of your dragoons / Who are falling for the Tsar, for the camp of your enslavers”. The poem ends with a curse:

Oh, brothers curse each other! Oh, damn each other!
Woe to the people that has in the world nothing but a turret,
That has given its heart to a stranger and sheds its seed on arid ground.

Shaul Tchernichovsky, ‘II Sonnet’ [translated by Jorg Schulte]

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Tatar Crimean Sonnets

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Chatyr-dag seen from the valley of the Segir river - graphic by Michał Elwiro Andriolli, photo. public domain.

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Written in Polish, published in the heart of the Russian Empire and considered a masterpiece of European lyric poetry, the Crimean Sonnets eventually became a mighty, supranational bearer of anti-imperial political resistance. Rediscovered by successive poets of various nationalities and various languages, but tied to the colonized territory, they became a prototype for later poetic resistance strategies.

It should come as no surprise, then, that soon after the fall of the USSR Tatar culture began to be reborn in Ukraine’s Crimea, and as Tatar families began returning to their old homeland (often after deportations many generations back, reaching back to the Stalinist era), Mickiewicz’s cycle also found its way into the Tatar language. Translated by Crimean Tatar poet Şakir Selim (1942–2008), the work was published in 1996 as Qirim Sonetleri̇. This was the first literary book published in the Crimean Tatar language in the Latin alphabet since the forced change of the alphabet to Cyrillic in the 1930s.

The book was re-released in 2013, a year before the illegal Russian annexation of the peninsula. As in Mickiewicz’s day, Russia occupied Crimea once again, continuing their policy of Russification, restricting freedoms, oppressing the local Tatars and Ukrainians and destroying their heritage. Mickiewicz’s work rang out once more in tones of resistance and mourning:

Today but black-winged vultures wheel about the graves,
Black as the mourning flags which sadly droop
From each home in a town broken by plague.

‘Castle Ruins in Balaklava’, translated by Charles Kraszewski

Author: Mikołaj Gliński, December 2023. Translated by Soren Gauger

Sources: Jordan Finkin, With footsteps marking roundabout paths, in Jewish Poetry on Crimea; Ryszard Löw, Mickiewicz w kręgu hebrajskim, in Literackie podsumowania. Polsko-hebrajskie. Polsko-izraelskie; Jörg Schulte, Saul Tchernikhovski, in Colloquia Humanistica 3 (2014); Yelena Severina, Lesya Ukrainka's Crimean Cycles: A Poetic Dialogue with Adam Mickiewicz (2021), Jerzy Świdziński, Sonety krymskie, czyli sposób artystycznego łudzenia despoty; Adam Mitskeviç, Qirim Sonetleri̇, trans. Şakir Selim (2013)

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