Black Sea

by Neal Ascherson

  He was in fact Witt's senior counter-intelligence officer, just possibly a man who reported to St Petersburg on Witt himself, and during the spring and summer of 1825 he had been leading the unit assembled to penetrate the assassination plot against Alexander I. A daring, rather imaginative man who wrote travel books and novels, Boshniak had developed a simple technique: he would call upon a conspirator, disclose that he was a police agent and then, declaring revolutionary convictions, beg to be allowed to join the plot. These were trustful, amateurish times. Boshniak had several successes with this approach in Odessa. One legend says that he managed to arrange a meeting with three of the most important Decembrists in St Petersburg, and told them that General Witt was secretly disaffected and wished to be assigned a role in their plans. Pavel Ivanovich Pestel, the leading figure in the conspiracy, was tempted to take Boshniak's offer seriously until his colleagues took him aside and talked sense into him.

  Adam Mickiewicz must now have realised that the whole Crimean trip had been a cover devised by Witt for an operation by Boshniak. That realisation in turn pointed to questions about Karolina Sobariska which even he must have found difficult to ignore.

  But his obstinacy about her inner 'goodness' persisted. In his play The Confederates of Bar, Boshniak appears as The Doctor', a sinister interrogator and spy who advises the bluff Russian general in charge of the city of Krakow. He implores the general to let him take over and run the countess, the general's Polish mistress, who would be an invaluable agent if she could be persuaded to collect intelligence from all her contacts. But the doctor also warns his chief that the countess is politically unreliable. In her youth, she loved Jozef Pulaski, the leader of the Polish anti-Russian conspiracy, and he strongly suspects that she or at least members of her 'numerous family' may still be in contact with him.

  Before the manuscript infuriatingly breaks off, on a situation of cliff-hanging suspense at the end of Act Two, it has turned out that the countess is still in love with Pulaski, and that her father is joining him in the hills to prepare an attack on the city's Russian garrison. Meanwhile the general, with the countess in tow, has set off on a journey of reconnaissance into the same hills and is about to burst into the very clearing where the plotters have gathered. Her father, though he has discovered that his own daughter is with the approaching Russians, is standing by his order to kill every man of them — and every woman.

  The rest of The Confederates of Bar is lost. But melodrama has its own rules. Enough survives to point towards a climax in which the countess is revealed to be a patriot (possibly at the cost of her own martyrdom, even dying in Pulaski's arms?), while the doctor will almost certainly slink off frustrated, snarling that he will do better next time.

  The journey from Odessa to Moscow was a slow one. By the time that Mickiewicz arrived it was mid-December, and Russian history had been made while he was on the road.

  Alexander I had died. He had gone to Taganrog, but the plot against him had been broken up by Witt and Boshniak and he perished not by the dagger but in his bed of a fever. A few weeks later, after an ill-concealed family struggle, he was succeeded by his brother Nicholas. Two days after that, the conspirators in St Petersburg struck.

  All through a day of terrible frost, their troops stood drawn up on Senate Square, penned in by regiments loyal to the new tsar. Nicholas I stood and watched as the conspirators turned down one offer of negotiation after another. Finally, as a greenish-black dust settled over the snow, he ordered the artillery to open fire with grapeshot at point-blank range. That was the end of the Decembrist uprising, and the beginning of a reign of police terror which was to last, with few intermissions, for thirty years. The arrests spread all

  over the land. Several of Mickiewicz's friends, including Ryleyev, were hanged. Many more ended their lives in Siberia.

  Adam Mickiewicz left Russia three years later, hiding below decks in a British steamer bound for Germany. He never returned. His ardent support for the Polish national uprising in 1830 condemned him to a lifetime of exile; this, as it turned out, was the 'sea tempest' which blew the hawk far from land and left its fate to the tolerance of strangers. Almost the whole intellectual, class of Poland, as well as the military and political leadership, went abroad, and the 'Great Emigration', which settled principally in Paris, contrived to maintain not only the cause of independence but the integrity and even the fertility of the national culture. The classic age of Polish literature is the early and middle nineteenth century, and almost all of it was written in exile. The central figure of that literature was Mickiewicz himself.

  The same gale soon blew Karolina Sobariska away as well. She had made Pushkin's acquaintance in Odessa, and on a visit to St Petersburg shortly after the departure of Mickiewicz she met him again and added herself to the list of his brief, desperate conquests. Some love letters to her survive, and a portrait-sketch, and a poem or two, but the letters are mere drafts and may never have been sent (Pushkin, characteristically, toiled over their wording and every apparently dashed-off phrase - 'I was born both to love and to pursue you!' — turns out to be the product of a mess of crossings-out and discarded bits of vocabulary). In 1836, well after the Polish uprising and her crisis with Benckendorff, Witt finally threw Karolina out, and in the same year she married his old adjutant, Stefan Cherkovitz, a Serbian officer in Russian service who had been responsible for some of the worst butchery during the recapture of Warsaw.

  When Cherkovitz died, Karolina moved to Paris. She married Jules Lacroix, translator of Shakespeare and author of fourteen novels, brother of the more famous and even more fecund writer Paul Lacroix. In 1850 she was joined by her sister Ewa (Evelina), who had finally married the dying Balzac in the church at Berdichev, near her Ukrainian estate, and brought him back to Paris. For the rest of her life, which turned out to be a very long one, Karolina Sobariska lived in calm and comfort, playing cards, going to the theatre and taking no interest whatever in politics.

  It is possible that she met Mickiewicz once more. The biography of the poet by Mieczyslaw Jastruh describes an ambitious dinner party which Karolina and Jules gave in Paris, at which Honore de Balzac was placed next to the guest of honour, 'the greatest Polish poet'. The evening is supposed to have turned out badly. Mickiewicz detested the new fashion of Balzacian realism, and said rudely that nothing would be lost if two-thirds of the books published in Paris were burned like the Library of Alexandria. Balzac, talking offence, retorted that poetic narrative, the favourite form of both Pushkin and Mickiewicz, was as dead as a doornail.

  The problem with this story is its dating. It was in 1847 that Mickiewicz wrote to Margaret Fuller remarking that he 'hoped' to meet Karolina in Paris one day. The dinner must therefore have happened in the three years before Balzac's death in August 1850. But the novelist had spent almost the whole of the previous two years on Ewa's Ukrainian estate at Wierzchownia, and in the three months between their return to Paris and his death he was far too ill to go to smart dinner-parties. It is true that Balzac was back in France between January and September 1848, but for almost all that time Mickiewicz was in Italy raising Polish legions for the revolution. Perhaps they did meet, in one of the few weeks when it was possible. At all events, the divergence of spirit was a real one. Mickiewicz did not appreciate Balzac's gigantic energy and humanity, and thought him vulgar. Balzac, although he knew a great deal about Poland through his 'Evelina', could only dismiss Mickiewicz as a dinosaur left over from the epoch of Romantic delusions.

  After Balzac's death, Karolina for a time kept her widowed sister company as she confronted the task of paying off Balzac's debts -her Ukrainian estate had to be sold — and arranging for new editions of his work. The awful Balzac family, in spite of Ewa's patience and kindness, spread the word that she was a gold-digger and tart who had only married Honore for his money. They hated Karolina too, mostly because she talked Polish to her sister while playing whist with them. Karolina outlived them all. But if she ever did meet Adam Mickiew
icz again, there is no reliable record of it. •

  The Turkish policeman, in his brown uniform, holds out the tray on which a pair of scissors has been laid on a scarf of Polish embroidery. Mr Jastrz^bski, Prefect of the Province of Warsaw, steps forward and performs a ceremonial snip. The covering slips from the memorial plaque, and the small crowd of Turkish and Polish dignitaries claps. Then they move in to peer at the inscription.

  'Here in the Polish village anciently known as Adampol, Poles lived and are living.' The words are repeated in Polish and Turkish: on the plaque, the crowned White Eagle of Poland and the Star and Crescent of Turkey are engraved side by side.

  A few miles inland from the Bosporus and the Black Sea, in the hills of the Asian shore, lies the village of Polonezkoy or Adampol. It was founded a hundred and fifty years ago, with the permission of the Ottoman sultans, as a settlement for Polish soldiers and their families, veterans of the long struggle against Russia who had enlisted in the Ottoman armies on the principle that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend'. Twenty-five Polish families still live here; another ten, now living in Istanbul, come back to their cottages for the holiday season.

  The place was named Adampol after Prince Adam Czartoryski, the uncrowned king of the Great Emigration, who came from his headquarters in the Hotel Lambert in Paris to rent the land from the sultan in 1842.. The first settlers were officers and men who had retreated into the Ottoman Empire after the failure of the 1830 Rising. In 1858, after the end of the Crimean War, they were joined by the demobilised troops of the 'Ottoman Cossacks', the legion raised from emigrants and Polish prisoners of war in the vain hope that Allied victory over Russia would bring the liberation of their country. The last big influx came with the defeat of the January Rising in 1863.

  Polonezkoy still feels like a colony. The neat little houses, with their walls, barns and orchards, resemble a village in western Poland. The school is closed now, but the Catholic church, dedicated to the Black Madonna of Cz^stochowa, is still full every Sunday. Visitors are taken to the house of 'Aunt Zosia', the matriarch of the Ryzy family, where seven different icons of the Madonna hang in the dim wooden bedroom and the front room is decorated with portraits of Czartoryski, Marshal Pilsudski and General Sikorski. On one wall is a large, lurid poster showing the defence of Lwow (now Lvov, in western Ukraine) by Polish schoolchildren and cadets in 1919. Near the front door, tactfully, the picture of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is put beside the inevitable photograph of Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II.

  When Polonezkdy was founded, the Ottoman Empire was a multi-national realm — not unlike the old Polish Commonwealth. Military loyalty and civil obedience were required from the subjects, rather than ethnic, linguistic or religious conformity. Greeks (the large and ancient population known as Pontic Greeks) still dominated the southern shore of the Black Sea; Armenians and Jews ran the bureaucracy and the economy. It did not seem at all unnatural to the sultan to ally with Catholic Poles against Russia; it was the Poles, although they needed the alliance most, who at first found it hard to swallow. Their national self-image as the eastward bastion (przedmurze) of Christendom had been formed mostly in war against the Ottoman Empire and the Tatars, and in 1683 King John Sobieski, by saving Vienna from the Turks, had brought to an end the threat of Moslem expansion into Central Europe. But the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century and the loss of independence forced the Poles to reassess their view of the world. Russia, not Turkey, was now the great enemy. The flower of Eastern Catholic chivalry resolved to make an agonising compromise.

  The sultans took a more pragmatic view. At receptions for the diplomatic corps in Istanbul, the marshal who called out each ambassador for presentation continued to announce 'His Excellency from Lechistan' (Poland). The awkward silence which then followed was a source of fury for one Russian envoy to the Supreme Porte after another.

  For the first few Adampol generations, the colony was effectively run from Paris without Turkish objections. The church and the school flourished, and weekly reports on the settlement were drawn up by the wojt (the governor of the little colony) and sent back to the Hotel Lambert. Then, after 1863, climate began to change. The collapse of the last great insurrection brought about a profound national disillusion; at Adampol, it was no longer possible to regard the settlement as a military colony in which new legionaries were being bred for the next uprising. Insensibly, the Poles there began to come to terms with Turkish society about them. When Poland regained independence in 1918, the warriors' great-grandchildren no longer felt like going home. The new Kemalist republic, which had succeeded the Ottoman Empire, left the Poles in peace, in spite of its fanatical insistence on ethnic homogeneity and 'Turkey for the Turks'. The settlers decided that they would continue to be Polish, but in Turkey.

  Today, the colony is beginning to dissolve. New roads, and the huge motorway bridges across the Bosporus, have brought Polonezkoyu within half an hour's drive of Istanbul. New laws have undermined the colony's structure. In 1968, the setders were granted the right to sell their land and houses, and the strict control of the wojt over the colony's territory broke down. In recent years, the Istanbul middle class has begun to move in, buying up farmland for holiday bungalows or private clinics. Most of the families whose names are on the gravestones in the village cemetery, the Ochockis and Wilkoszewskis and Nowickis, have turned their houses into thriving 'pensions' with restaurants, popular with well-off Turks looking for a discreet place to take a girl for the weekend. Real estate and the hotel trade have replaced farming as the main sources of income.

  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.