The Image of Crimea in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, by Aleksandr Pushkin, and in Crimean Sonnets, by Adam Mic kie wicz Crimea as Greece
I
n the fall of 1820, an inquisitive and cultured Russian nobleman un-dertook an eight-week trip through the Crimean peninsula. His name was Ivan Matveevich Muravyov-Apostol; a member of a collateral branch of the noted Muravyov family, he lived a long and eventful life from 1765 to 1851. At the time of his Crimean voyage he had behind him a distin-guished record as an army officer and an eminent career as a classical scholar; had been tutor in classical languages to the Grand Duke Kon-stantin Pavlovich and his brother Nikolai Pavlovich, the future tsar; had held diplomatic posts at the Russian legations in Hamburg and in Mad-rid; and had published Russian translations of Horace and Aristophanes.Five years in the future lay the fateful Decembrist uprising in which he was to lose two of his three sons and several of his nephews. Two years before the uprising, in 1823, came the published account of his Crimean journey, under the title Puteshestvie po Tavride, which caused the name of Muravyov-Apostol to be remembered in literary history.
Crimea became a tourist attraction immediately after it was incorpo-rated into the Russian Empire in 1783. One of the first tourists to come was Catherine the Great. It was for her sojourn that several rooms in the old palace of the Gireys at Bakhchisarai were redecorated in the current West-ern European style (the Gireys were the Crimean Khans who were direct descendants and successors of the Golden Horde of Genghis-Khan). By the time of Muravyov-Apostol’s voyage, a number of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travelers had published descriptions of Crimea, among them an enterprising Englishwoman named Mrs. Guthrie, whose book entitled A Tour through the Taurida or Crimea was highly regarded by Muravyov-Apostol, despite her insistence on hearing “the flute of The-ocritus in every Tatar reed-pipe.”2
1 Originally published in California Slavic Studies 2 (1963): 108–20.
2 I. M. Murav’ev-Apostol, Puteshestvie po Tavride v 1820 gode [sic] (St. Petersburg, 1823), 175.
To most of these travelers, Crimea meant first of all the setting of the tragedies of Iphigenia and Mithridates: an ancient Greek colony men-tioned many times in classical literature. Muravyov-Apostol was even more classically oriented in his aims than his predecessors had been. Armed with a thorough knowledge of Greek and Latin literatures and with some dubious archaeological hypotheses of his own, he set out to determine the exact locations of various Crimean points of interest mentioned in Strabo, Herodotus, Pliny, and others. But Muravyov-Apostol was also familiar with new developments in the English and German literatures of his time:
his book opens with a quotation from Byron, and several more quotations from English, German, and Italian poets are modestly interspersed in the body of the book among the learned references. The classical tastes of the author are not to be doubted when he admits to preferring Vergil to either Shakespeare or Ariosto, yet he is sufficiently a man of his time to have in-cluded in his book descriptions of the picturesque ruins at Balaklava, of a dramatic confrontation between an aged Tatar and his daughter, who had run away with a Christian, and, of course, of the principal nonclassical tourist attraction, Bakhchisarai. Such passages are written in Karamzinian Russian prose, intended to touch the reader and, by rather obvious means, to engage his sympathies. Especially telling in this respect is the descrip-tion of the dangerous crossing of Mount Kikeneiz. These picturesque epi-sodes, rather than the archaeology and geography which are the author’s principal concern, brought Puteshestvie po Tavride its high reputation among the author’s contemporaries. Two great poets, Adam Mic kie wicz and Aleksandr Pushkin, were among the enthusiastic readers.
Both of these poets had had their own Crimean vacations. Their itineraries—the standard tourists’ tour of the time—paralleled that of Muravyov-Apostol. Pushkin’s trip occurred in the summer of 1820, when he spent three happy weeks in Gurzuf with the family of General Raevsky, staying at the same house of the Duc de Richelieu that Muravyov-Apostol was to visit a few months later, and participating in excursions to such points as Bakhchisarai and Mount Kikeneiz. As is often pointed out, it was on this trip and through the Raevskys that Pushkin first came into contact with the poetry of Byron. Pushkin’s Crimean impressions were later reflected in a number of short poems and in the most popularly successful work of his earlier period, the narrative poem The Fountain of Bakhchisarai.
Two Pushkin Studies
Even before reading Muravyov-Apostol’s book, Pushkin wrote to Vyazemsky, asking him to select suitable passages from it and to reprint them, by way of introduction (together with Vyazemsky’s own preface) in the first edition of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. After reading the book at Mikhailovskoe late in 1824, Pushkin composed his often-quoted “letter”
to Delvig (actually a sort of literary meditation, obviously intended for publication), in which he compares his own impressions of Crimea with Muravyov-Apostol’s and comes to an oddly Proustian conclusion about the ability of human memory to transform past impressions with its mag-ic power. The letter was included by the poet in the third edition of The Fountain, along with the Muravyov-Apostol description of Bakhchisarai selected earlier by Vyazemsky.
Adam Mic kie wicz was acquainted both with Pushkin’s poem and with Muravyov-Apostol’s book at the time of his two Crimean excur-sions in the spring and summer of 1825. In June of that year, the exiled Polish poet left Odessa and, accompanied by Henryk Rzewuski, paid a visit to Count Gustaw Olizar in Gurzuf, the village in which Pushkin and Muravyov-Apostol had spent some time in 1820. About a month and a half later, Mic kie wicz returned to Crimea with a larger group of traveling companions, among whom was Rzewuski’s sister, the redoubtable femme fatale Karolina Sobańska, with whom the poet was romantically involved and who had been the subject of his earlier love sonnets. This time Mic-kie wicz made a thorough study of local Sehenswürdigkeiten, meanwhile being spied upon by Aleksandr Boshnyak, the same government agent who a year later was to send the authorities a long report about Pushkin’s doings at Mikhailovskoe. The result of the poet’s impressions made up the celebrated Crimean Sonnets.
The most obvious point of contact between the Crimean impressions found in the three authors is in their respective treatments of the legend of the Polish captive of the Khan, which forms the subject of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, is alluded to by Mic kie wicz in the sonnet “Grób Potoc kiej”
(Potocka’s grave), and is discussed in the book by Muravyov-Apostol.
Other profitable comparisons could conceivably be made; for example, the evidently related, awesome passages on Kikeneiz in the sonnet of that name and in Muravyov-Apostol, as contrasted to Pushkin’s “letter”
to Delvig, in which the poet merely recalls his amusement at the quaint Oriental method of mountain climbing. In the notes to “Grób Potockiej”
Mic kie wicz mentions The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, as well as Muravyov-Apostol’s book, which he calls “uczenie i pięknie napisana” (eruditely and beautifully written). The thorough familiarity of Mic kie wicz with the latter book can also be deduced from a phrase in his letter to Joachim Lelewel, written in January of 1827: “Deptałem chmury na Czatyrdahu (podobno Trapezie starożytnym)” (I trod the clouds on Chatyr Dagh [like an ancient Trapezion]).3 This identification of the Crimean mountain mentioned by Strabo is one of the theses that Muravyov-Apostol claimed to have proven during his journey.
Puteshestvie po Tavride was not a primary source for either Pushkin or Mic kie wicz.4 But reading it alongside their Crimean poetry makes one appreciate more fully their originality and helps one to understand the impact of the Crimean landscape and tradition on the poetic imagination of two contemporary but in many ways profoundly dissimilar poets.
Greece or Italy?
There were four literary traditions that were bound to occur to any poet who contemplated a literary treatment of Crimea in the 1820s. There was, first of all, the classical heritage of the area: the Greek ruins, the use of
3 Quoted by Leon Gomolicki in Dziennik pobytu Adama Mic kie wicza w Rosji 1824–1829 [The diary of Adam Mic kie wicz’s stay in Russia 1824–1829] (Warsaw, 1949), 175. The Crimean place names in quotations from the writings of Mic kie wicz and in the titles of his sonnets are given in this study in his own Polish spellings. When quoted from Russian sources, the same place names have been transcribed directly from the Rus-sian. The resulting doublings (e.g., Bagczysaraj and Bakhchisarai, Kykyneis and Kike-neiz, Czatyrdah and Chatyr Dagh) seemed preferable to a uniformity which could have been achieved only by an arbitrary transcription of Russian spellings of Tatar place names into Polish.
4 The book by A. L. Pogodin, cited by Professor Weintraub (Wiktor Weintraub, The Poetry of Adam Mic kie wicz [’s-Gravenhage, 1954], 107) on the subject of Muravyov-Apostol as a source of Crimean Sonnets, was not available to me at the time the pres-ent study was written. I relied only on my own comparison of the two texts. Since that time I have had an opportunity to examine the work in question, A. L. Pogodin, Adam Mitskevich: Ego zhizn’ i tvorchestvo (Moscow, 1912), vol. 1, chap. 14, “Krymskie sonety.” The point-by-point comparison of the itineraries of the poet and the traveler in the chapter on the sonnets is certainly valid, but both Pogodin and the Polish critic W. Bruchnalski, whom he quotes, tend to exaggerate the role of Muravyov-Apostol’s influence. One need only examine the diction and the tone of the two texts to see that there can be no question of any emotional or stylistic impact of Muravyov-Apostol on the Crimean Sonnets.
Two Pushkin Studies
Crimean settings in such works of later classicism as Gluck’s opera Iphigé-nie en Tauride and Racine’s Mithridate, in which “la scène est à Nymphée, port de mer sur le Bosphore Cimmérien, dans la Taurique Chersonèse.”
This aspect of Crimea always held great attraction for Pushkin, from his 1820 “Epistle to Chaadaev,” about the ruins of the temple of Diana, to one of his later evocations of Crimea in “Onegin’s Travels,” in which he adds the memory of Mic kie wicz to such other sacred traditions of the area as the contest in generosity between Orestes and Pilades and the sui-cide of Mithridates. Pushkin usually called Crimea by its ancient name of Tauris (Tavrida in Russian), while Mic kie wicz resolutely stuck to its Tatar name, Krym. Not only the shift in poetic fashions within the five years that separate Pushkin’s Crimean sojourn from that of Mic kie wicz, but also a profound difference in temperament and taste, must account for the fact that Crimea’s classical heritage was of such scant interest to Mic kie wicz, who, in some of his other poetry, did use classical imagery.
The next two traditions which Crimea would call to mind correspond-ed to the two schools of nature poetry: that of the warm Mcorrespond-editerranean landscape (usually Italian), with its cypresses, lemon trees, and blue skies;
and that of savage, stupendous nature, with stormy seas and towering mountains. Although found in the poetry of many periods, these settings had been neglected by the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century classicists, but had been revived by the Preromantics and developed by Romantic poets. Meridional nature was frequently connected with the theme of homesickness, whereas savage nature seems to have been related to the Nordic poetry of ruins and, possibly, of ghosts. Among those of the Crimean Sonnets that are not specifically based on Oriental imagery,
“Stepy Akermańskie” (The Akkerman steppes) and “Pielgrzym” (The pil-grim) fit neatly into the first category, while “Bajdary” (Baydary), with its savage seacoast, and “Ruiny zamku w Bałakławie” (The ruins of the castle of Balaklava) represent the Romantic poetry of wild and desolate places.
The picturesque aspect of desolation is as rare in Pushkin’s Crimean poetry as classical allusions are in that of Mic kie wicz. On the other hand, the idyllic, southern poetic tradition represents a common ground on which the styles of the Polish and the Russian poets occasionally coin-cide. Pushkin thought of Crimea in terms of Italy as readily as in terms of ancient Greece, and, as always, his uncanny ability to take over any existing poetic manner or tradition and make it entirely his own enabled
him to create something that appeared fresh and new. A case in point is his description of Crimea in his 1821 poem “Kto videl krai” (also printed under the title “Tavrida” in some editions), unmistakably yet subtly based on one of the best-known poetic evocations of Italy in Western literature, Mignon’s song from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.
The closing passages of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai contain a lovely description of this blessed, opulent Crimea-Italy; a similar, quasi-Italian landscape occasionally also shows through the usually Orientalized Crimea of the Mic kie wicz sonnets. Among the comparable images: (1) there is the poet on horseback on the Crimean seacoast (the very end of The Fountain and the sonnet “Bajdary”); (2) “U stóp moich kraina dostatków i krasy”
(At my feet a land of plenty and beauty), which opens “Pielgrzym,” recalls
“Volshebnyi krai, ochei otrada” in Pushkin; (3) the description of the rock of Ayudagh at the end of The Fountain is not unlike the first quatrain of the sonnet “Ajudah” (Ayudah); and (4) both poets make lyrical use of the river Salgir, though “Salhiry dziewice” (the maidens of Salhir) seems to be more closely related to “plennitsy beregov Salgira” in the first chapter of Evgeny Onegin.5
Both poets like to compare features of the Crimean landscape to jew-els: the rubies and garnets of the dew in the morning forest in “Ałuszta w dzień” (Alushta by day) (“Jak z różańca Chalifów rubin i granaty” [A ruby and garnets like from the prayer-beads of the caliphs]) and “rubinowe morwy” (ruby-red mulberries) in “Pielgrzym” vividly recall Pushkin’s frequent comparisons of grapes to jewels (“iantar’ i iakhont vinograda” in The Fountain, “iantar’ visit na lozakh vinograda” in “Kto videl krai”). But there is a difference in the way this effect is used: in Pushkin the grapes-jewels are Italianate, but in Mic kie wicz they are Moslemized:
Tu z winnicy miłosći niedojrzałe grona Wzięto na stół Allaha
(Here from the vineyard of love unripe clusters Have been taken for Allah’s table);
5 Both Pushkin and Mic kie wicz seem to associate the river Salgir with Bakhchisarai, where it does not flow. Bertier de la Garde, in Pushkin i ego sovremenniki, vols. 17/18 (St. Petersburg, 1913), explains the inconsistency by the fact that “salgir” in Crimea is also a generic term, meaning any river and not only the one bearing the proper name of Salgir.
Two Pushkin Studies
and while in Pushkin the evocation of jewelry may occasionally also create a deliberate Oriental effect (the metonymic “iantar’” for Girey’s water pipe at the beginning of The Fountain, the amber rosaries in the description of the deserted harem), the jewels of Mic kie wicz are in-variably Oriental: “perełki wschodu” (pearls of the East), “baldachim z brylantów” (baldachin of jewels), and the already-mentioned ruby and garnet rosaries of dew.
It must be pointed out that the emotional use of the southern land-scape is diametrically opposite in the two poets: Pushkin sees Crimea from a distance and yearns to return to it, whereas Mic kie wicz describes himself as actually present in Crimea and yearning for Lithuania (“Stepy Akermańskie,” “Grób Potockiej,” “Pielgrzym”). But again the two poets find a meeting ground in the idea that the Crimean landscape is condu-cive to melancholy recollections of the past. This theme, present in almost all of Pushkin’s evocations of Crimea, is strikingly expressed in the com-parison of memory with a polyp in the sestet of the sonnet “Cisza morska”
(The calm of the sea).
Orient à l’anglaise
The native inhabitants of Crimea, the Crimean Tatars, were Moslems. This single fact brought Crimea into the province of the fourth poetic tradition, which was all the rage in the literary life of the 1820s: that of Oriental, or, more specifically, Near Eastern Moslem exoticism. The fashion seems to have started in England with Beckford; it was brought into Romantic po-etry by Landor and Southey after 1800, and was made immensely popular in the second decade of the nineteenth century through such works as Byron’s The Bride of Abydos and The Giaour and Chateaubriand’s Iti-néraire de Paris à Jérusalem. Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan came in 1811;
Pushkin and Mic kie wicz popularized the style in the literatures of their respective countries; and French poetry finally capitulated to the Orient in 1829 when Hugo’s Les orientales was published. The decorative use of Oriental detail and the deliberate evocation of couleur locale were in direct contrast to the use of the Moslem world in such earlier works as Racine’s Bajazet and Voltaire’s Zaïre, in which exotic details were avoided and the similarity of the Moslem to the European was stressed. The Orientalism of the Romantics presupposed a certain amount of deliberate stylization,
based on imitating the styles of Arabian and Persian poets; in this respect, Mic kie wicz outdoes not only Pushkin, but also Byron and even Goethe.
Among the works of Pushkin inspired by Crimea we find a two-page beginning of an unfinished humorous poem, a free adaptation of an Ori-ental conte by Sénecé, about the life of the Crimean Tatars, which begins:
Nedavno bednyi musul’man V Iurzufe zhil s det’mi, s zhenoiu …
Inconclusive as it is, this fragment offers an interesting notion of the kind of Crimean couleur locale that a poet could produce, were he to rely only on his own observations of the area rather than on its history or on the prevailing literary fashions at the moment of writing. The family described here is obviously Moslem, but there is not a single Romantically exotic detail in their prosaic and humorously described doings. In his letter to Vyazemsky, written in March or April of 1825, Pushkin expresses his at-titude toward Oriental stylization in these words:
Oriental style was a model for me as much as is possible for us sensible and cold Europeans. Incidentally, do you know why I do not like Moore?
Because he is much too Oriental. He imitates in a puerile and ugly way the puerility and ugliness of Saadi, Hafiz, and Mahomet. A European, even in his enthusiasm for Oriental luxury, must retain the taste and the vision of a European. That is why Byron is so charming in The Giaour and in The Bride of Abydos.
Because he is much too Oriental. He imitates in a puerile and ugly way the puerility and ugliness of Saadi, Hafiz, and Mahomet. A European, even in his enthusiasm for Oriental luxury, must retain the taste and the vision of a European. That is why Byron is so charming in The Giaour and in The Bride of Abydos.