Four Orientialists and Three Writers (1800-70)

Like Count Jan Potocki, whom we met in chapter 1, his kinsman Count WacJaw Rzewuski/Viacheslav Revusky (1784-1831) (Plate 4) belonged to one of the great families of right-bank Ukraine, but his father, like the Potockis, had (in 1792) joined the Confederation of Targowica against Polish king StanisJaw Augustus Poniatowski and the 3 May Constitution, which alli­ance aided the Russian Tsarina Catherine II in the last partitions of Poland.

After the last partition of Poland in 1795, Rzewuski resided in Vienna, joining the Austrian army. But science and scholarship interested him more, and he worked closely with the Orientalist scholars J. Klaproth and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Also in Vienna, he studied Arabic with a Maronite priest, Antun Ariba, and Turkish with a political emigre named Ramiz Pasha. In 1812-13, he was back in Volhynia (in Russian-ruled Ukraine), where, with the influential Polish educator and tsarist administrator Tadeusz Czacki, he founded the famous Lyceum at Kremenets. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Rzewuski met Tsar Alexander I and his wife, Caroline of Wittenberg, and suggested that they finance his proposed ex­pedition to Arabia to search for thoroughbred horses to replenish European stocks decimated in the Napoleonic Wars. The tsar agreed, and Rzewuski set out for Constantinople, Syria, and Arabia with a medical officer and a small troop of Ukrainian Cossacks.¹

For about two years (1818-20) Rzewuski travelled widely across Ana­tolia and throughout the Arab lands. He dressed in Arabic garb, took up the local manners, and mixed easily with the Bedouin, who respected him and called him, fittingly, “Goldenbeard.” He adopted the names Emir Taj al-Fahr (crown of glory [= Wadaw]) and Abd-al Nishan (slave of the sign).

“Goldenbeard” was looking constantly for the best horses for export to Europe and making abundant notes on the lands and peoples he met. Even­tually, he settled in Aleppo. In Palmyra, he met the English adventurer Lady Esther Stanhope, like him an enthusiast for the Islamic world. All the while, he wrote about his discoveries and adventures for various Polish and western European newspapers and journals and told the Arabs about the power and might of the Russian tsar. Indeed, one modern Polish historian believes that he was a tsarist agent, working quietly against British and French influences in the region. Eventually, a great revolt against Ottoman rule caused him to leave Aleppo, and he returned to Constantinople and arranged to have his horses sent to Europe, where some went to the armies of the post-1815 Con­gress Kingdom of Poland (Russian Poland) and of Imperial Russia.²

On his return to Ukraine, Rzewuski maintained his interest in Arabic and Islamic culture. He studied Arabic manuscripts and amassed a great collection, continued to dress in Arabic clothing, and actually shocked the tsar when his activities and look were reported to him; the tsar ordered that he immediately shave his “Goldenbeard.”³

Rzewuski wrote several notable manuscripts, articles, and reports that he published in von Hammer-Purgstalls multilingual journal (which he co-sponsored), Mines de VorientZFundgruben des Orients (= Eastern Trea­sures), Europe's first journal dedicated to the Middle East. He composed studies with titles such as Arabic Melodies, Greek Melodies, and Reflections on the Ruins of Palmyra. Bucking his family traditions, he wrote a mu­sical score for Niemcewiczs Spiewy historyczne (Historical Songs), which became enormously popular among patriotic Poles. But his magnum opus was his manuscript narrative in French on his journey through the Middle East, about his adventures there (vol.

Rzewuskis interest in “the East” extended to Europe's Steppe frontier, and he held court at his chateau at Savran in right-bank Ukraine, where he cultivated Cossack traditions, studied Ukrainian folk music, especially historical songs, collected Ukrainian musical instruments, and patronized various poets and artists, including the Ukrainian poet and “Torban” player Tymko Padura, who wrote Ukrainian lyrics and poetry using non­Cyrillic Polish letters. Padura composed a duma, or epic reflective song, in Rzewuski's honour, and his Hej Sokoly (Hey, Falcons!) remains one of Poland's best-known Ukrainian folksongs and serves as the theme song of the flying aces of today's Ukrainian Air Force. ⁵

However, when the Poles revolted against Russian rule in 1830-31, Rzewuski joined the insurrection with his Arabic thoroughbreds and his private regiment of Cossacks. He disappeared in pitched battle with the Russians, and his body was never found. Afterwards, wild rumours circulated that he had escaped at the last minute and gone to Arabia, where he fitted in quite well and lived to a ripe old age. Polish Romantic-era writers composed poetry and stories in his memory, and the tale of “Emir” Rzewuski, the Cossack Arab from the Ukrainian-Polish borderlands, entered into Polish national legend.⁶

Today Rzewuski's colleague von Hammer-Purgstall is known primarily for his ten-volume Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches (History of the Ottoman Empire, published 1827-35), which, for the first time, synthesized European scholarship with the information contained in the Ottoman chronicles. But he was also one of the first major European translators and historians of Persian literature, especially the fourteenth-century poet Hafez.

Von Hammer's personal life too was influenced by “the Orient”: he be­gan each day praying inshaallah (If God wills it) and went to bed with a mashaallah (Whatever God wills). Moreover, despite being a pioneering historian of the Ottoman Empire, he preferred the poetic Persians to the “decadent” Turks and long dreamed of going to Iran. As a result, the conser­vative Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich blocked his advancement in the foreign service, probably fearing that it would harm Austrian-Ottoman relations. But that left von Hammer more time and energy for Ottoman history, to the eventual benefit of Turkish historians everywhere.⁸

Great writers too were drawn intensively to Eastern themes. Poland's national poet, Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), composed two major works devoted to “the Orient.” Sonety Krymskie (Crimean Sonnets, 1826) was inspired by his brief stay on that peninsula and in its old capital of Bachisaray, and Farys (1828), by the exploits of Emir Taj al-Fahr, “Goldenbeard” (Count Rzewuski). Like parts of Goethe's West-ostlicher Divan, Farys resembled a qasideh, a brief Persian or Arabic storied or purposeful poem, but becoming here a manifesto of extreme individualism and love for liberty, dwelling on the limitless desert and his subject's adventures.

In central and eastern Europe, Farys was read as a concealed call to national freedom and soon spawned Polish Romantic spin-offs, such as Juliusz Slowackis (1809-1849) Arab (1832) and Karel Balinskis Farys- wieszcz (1844). Slowacki, like Rzewuski from right-bank Ukraine, also imitated Chateaubriand and Lamartine in his own Podroz do Ziemi Swigtej z Neapolu (A Journey [1836-39] to the Holy Land from Naples) and elsewhere evoked Byron's Greek adventures. Podroz refers constantly to Ukraine, the land of his boyhood and youth and, according to one modern Polish historian, associates the Arab desert with the Ukrainian Steppe and “identifies the Bedouin with the Free Cossack.”⁹ Many lesser Polish works touched on similar themes, often concealing national patriotism only lightly under Oriental language and motifs. Moreover, the fact that so many of the authors were, like Potocki, Rzewuski, Mickiewicz, and Slowacki, from the eastern borderlands (Kresy) has not yet been properly explored by political and literary historians.¹⁰

Mickiewiczs Ukrainian counterpart, the Ukrainian “national poet,” Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), never set foot outside the Russian Empire, but had some very clear feelings about the Muslim peoples, who struggled against their Russian overlords. He was very sympathetic to the Muslims of the northern Caucasus and their great leader, Imam Shamil, then fighting a ferocious rearguard action against the Imperial Russian army, which was seeking to pacify and subdue them. One of Shevchenko's good friends had been conscripted into the fight and died at the hands of the resistance, but the Ukrainian poet championed those Caucasians.

In memory of his friend, in 1845, he penned his powerful “Kavkaz” (The Caucasus), which raised the specter of Prometheus, bound to a rock, high in the Caucasus, with the imperial eagle tearing at his flesh. Although Cossack Ukraine's oppression by the Muscovites is a major theme, it also seems a general protest against oppression anywhere.

A great many travellers from other parts of Poland and Ukraine than the Kresy (Shevchenko's birthplace too) went to Eastern lands or the Middle East. One of the most notable was the Russian writer of Ukrainian origin Nikolai Gogol/Mykola Hohol (1809-1852), who visited Palestine in 1848 on his return to the Russian Empire from western Europe. He seems to have read Igumen Daniel as interpreted by the historian Nikolai Karamzin, and had even as­sured a lady friend that he would write a full description of his voyage and those lands - which he never did. In fact, his personal troubles soured his impressions of both Jerusalem and Palestine as a whole: it seemed not to flow with milk and honey, but be rather a very barren place indeed, to judge from his few general and very brief remarks in private letters. After his return to Russia, his psychological problems only intensified, and he eventually starved himself to death, trying to atone for what he believed were his many sins.¹²

The “neo-Cossack” Mykhailo Chaikovsky/Michal Czajkowski (1804-1886) was known in his own time all over central and eastern Europe, both in the Balkans and north of the Carpathians, as (Mehmed) Sadyk Pasha. Although he wrote usually in Polish, his subjects were either Ukrainian (“Cossack”) or Ottoman Turkish, for he spent most of his active life in the Ottoman Empire as an adventurer, political intriguer, soldier, and writer, working tirelessly for what he believed was his ancestral “Cossack” heritage.¹³ A de­scendant of the Ukrainian Cossack hetman Ivan Briukovetsky, he was born into a somewhat-polonized family near Berdychiv in Kyiv province shortly before that region transferred from Polish to Russian rule. Just before the last partition of Poland, his father, Stanislaw, had held a senior administra­tive post in the local government (including Podkomarz of the Zhytomyr district), but his family raised and educated him to value Cossack traditions and Ukrainian folk culture. Indeed, as his memoirs noted, he was named after the Archangel Michael, protector of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and patron saint of the city of Kyiv. He grew up a local patriot, loyal to the idea of a resurrected Poland and esteeming Cossack Ukraine.¹⁴

But Chaikovsky as a youth preferred adventure to study and, when sent to Warsaw, complained that it was “not Cossack.” As well, as an Eastern Rite, or Greek Catholic, he disliked the Roman Catholic traditions of old Poland and blamed the Jesuits for turning the Poles and Ukrainians against each other in the seventeenth century. Moreover, he sympathized with the enserfed Ukrainian peasants, and, when the Polish insurrection of 1830 began and a Russian officer came to arrest him, his peasants defended their master and almost hanged the police official. Chaikovsky then freed his serfs and, together with his Cossacks, immediately joined the rebellion, serving under Karol Rozycki.¹⁵

But the insurrection failed, and Chaikovsky went into exile in Paris. There he turned to literature, writing novelettes on Cossack themes and complaining again that his fellow Polish exiles, even those from Ukraine, were not “Cossack” enough. His numerous books, written in Polish but filled with ukrainianisms, dealt mostly with Ukrainian history, the most famous being his Powiesci kozackie (Cossack Novels, 1837), translated into French as Contes kosaks (1857), although his two-volume tale, Weryhora (1838), about the legendary Ukrainian seer who predicted the Commonwealth's collapse and rebirth, also made a big impact. Throughout, the author extolled Cossack bravery, attacked Russian autocracy, criticized the old Polish landlords (szlachta) for oppressing the common Ukrainian people, put Jews and Jesuits on the same footing, and wrote that it would be better for modern Cossacks to make peace with the modern Poles and be under the distant lordship of the Ottoman sultan rather than the closer pressure of the Muscovite tsar.¹⁶

Meanwhile, in exile, Chaikovsky began to shift politically to the right. Eventually, he came under the influence of Prince Adam Czartoryski (1770­1861), who convinced him to transfer from the Greek to the Latin rite and in 1841 to go to Turkey to work against Russian influences in the Ottoman- ruled Balkans; he also attempted to firm up Ottoman resistance to Russia. The French foreign minister, Franςois Guizot, and the Turkish ambassador in London, Reshid Pasha, supported this enterprise. In Istanbul, our Cossack quickly adapted to local conditions. The Ottomans were still friendly to Russia because of the revolt of Egypt under Mohammed Ali, but soon came their tanzimat (internal reform), when the sultans modernized administration, education, and the armed forces to better compete with the threatening European powers, especially Habsburg Austria and Imperial Russia. European technical experts were welcomed, and the affable Chaikovsky, with his military experience and literary talents, soon fitted right in. He dressed like a Turk, fez and all, sat cross-legged on a carpet, and shared his tea in small glasses with other European and Polish exiles who followed his example, usually taking him for a Turk at first glance.

Chaikovsky opened the Polish Agency, which worked to counteract Russian spies and agents in Turkey, who were using Panslavic sentiments to raise the Balkan Slavonic peoples against their Ottoman overlords. Following Prince Czartoryski's plans, Chaikovsky proposed a gradual move towards independence for Christian Balkan Slavs. Despite some brief success in Serbia and Bulgaria, the pro-Russian tendency prevailed in both countries.¹⁷

Chaikovsky also hoped to establish a Polish colony on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. Polish refugees, deserters from the Russian army, veterans of the insurrection of 1830, and Slavs redeemed by the Polish Agency from Turkish servitude filled the colony, named Adampol after the exiled Czartoryski, but known in Turkish as Polonezkoy (Polish village). It flourished during the nineteenth century and still exists.¹⁸

Chaikovsky's importance grew immensely after the failure of the revolutions of 1848 in central Europe, especially in Hungary. Thousands of defeated insurgents sought political asylum in the Ottoman Empire. Chaikovsky and his numerous Ottoman contacts worked to protect them and settle them in Turkey, and, despite Russian and Austrian pressure, many became soldiers, administrators, doctors, and technicians. But Russian insistence on rebels' repatriation did not let up, and eventually affected even Chaikovsky. To escape deportation, he, like many others, converted to Islam, and he took the Muslim name Mehmed Sadyk Pasha, or Sadyk Pasha, for short (Plate 5).

About this time, in the early 1850s, he organized his regiment of Ottoman Cossacks. He travelled to Dobrudja, near the mouth of the Danube in Moldavia, to mediate a dispute between Russian Old Believer Cossacks and descendants of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who had fled to Turkey in 1775 after Catherine the Great destroyed their headquarters at the Sich in central Ukraine. Sadyk convinced many of them to join a new body of Ottoman Cossacks to serve the sultan in the event of war with Russia. Polish and Hungarian refugees, Balkan Slavs, Jews, and other men joined the unit, which was given old Cossack flags and insignia issued or captured by Ottoman forces in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The highlight, Sadyk later wrote in his memoirs, was a Zaporozhian standard that the sultan had presented to Phylyp Orlyk, successor in exile to Hetman Mazepa, when the Zaporozhians first entered Ottoman service - on one side, a red field with a silver Muslim half-crescent, and on the other, a white field with a golden cross of Orthodoxy.¹⁹ Only the Ottoman tanzimat reform era (starting in 1839) made possible this amazing combination.

During the Crimean War (1853-56), the Ottoman Cossacks saw service in Romania and the Balkans, but never raided Ukraine - Chaikovsky's dream. In Ukraine, rumours spread about his activities, and there were some Cos­sack disorders in the countryside. The 1845 constitution of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius (patron saints of Slavdom) in Kyiv, a qua- si-conspiracy broken by the tsar's police in 1847, supposedly echoed similar writings by emigre Poles in western Europe - possibly Chaikovsky's. Al­though accurate information about the Brotherhood emerged in Ukraine only much later, its example inspired the Ukrainian national movement.²⁰

After the Crimean War, Sadyk Pasha's influence declined. The death in 1861 of Sultan Abdul Mejid (reigned since 1839), his patron, other person­nel changes in the Ottoman government, reforms in Russia, and intrigues against him by fellow Polish exiles, especially General Zamoyski, who had replaced him at the Polish Agency, pushed him to reconcile with Moscow. He came to see some hope for Cossackdom in these changes, and Count Nikolai Ignatev, the Russian ambassador in Istanbul, eventually convinced him to return to Ukraine in 1872. Accepting an amnesty, he retired from Ottoman service, converted to Orthodoxy, and, with a young Greek wife, set off for Kyiv. He settled in the countryside and completed his detailed memoirs of his time in Ottoman service. Excoriated by many Poles, but welcomed with some puzzlement by others, he died in 1886.²¹

It is difficult to fit Chaikovsky into any nineteenth-century historical or national category. He had served both Poland and Turkey, but always claimed to be a loyal Cossack first. The mid-century Ukrainian national awakeners, who generally looked back fondly on their Cossack history, did not quite know what to make of him. For example, when Nikolai/Mykola Petrov wrote his pioneering history of Ukrainian literature, he omitted Chaikovsky and those authors who wrote in Polish. Mykola Dashkevych, in his influential, book-length review of Petrov's study, seemed puzzled by Chaikovsky. In him, the reviewer concluded: “Polish Cossackophilism reached its apotheosis, and simultaneously its extreme limit, and turned into an absurdity. Along with this, in the course of history and a very adventurous life, Chaikovsky found out in practice the difficulty of putting into action his dreams of the re-establishment of Poland and Ukrainian Cossackdom."²² But Dashkevych wrote in the face of stringent censorship, which rejected any overt expression of Ukrainian or Polish nationalism and, especially, independence. In his life, Chaikovsky, far more than Krusinski, Potocki, or Rzewuski, helped bridge Ukrainian (Orthodox), Polish (Catholic), and Ottoman (Muslim) cultures.

Aleksander Chodzko (1804-1891), a Pole from the Lithuanian part of the Kresy, ventured east as far as the Persian province of Khorasan, which neighboured Afghanistan, and throughout the Persian Empire. Everywhere he went, he made copious notes on places, people, events, and languages and customs.

Chodzko was one of three brothers in a patriotic Polish family of gentry origin. He attended university at Vilnius (now capital of Lithuania), where he mixed with Adam Mickiewicz, Antoni Edward Odyniec, and other members of the patriotic secret Society of Philomaths. More widely read than the others, he explained to them the tenets of the rising Romantic movement and Byron's motives. He too began to write poetry with exotic and Oriental motifs, and Mickiewicz, a close friend and rival, thought him the best poet of this circle.²³

However, the tsar's police soon discovered the Philomaths and sent them to prison or into exile. Chodzko spent about a year in captivity, but on his release in 1821 went to the Oriental Institute in St Petersburg to study Oriental languages. Under the Azerbaijani professor Mirza Jafar Topchybashi, he specialized in Persian and related languages and excelled; on his graduation, the imperial government sent him to Iran as consular translator and representative.

He began his work in Tabriz in Persian Azerbaijan, but later went to Tehran, and then to Rasht on the Caspian Sea, in Gilan province. He studied the local language, a tongue quite different from literary Persian, and later did the same in Iranian Kurdistan. He listened to local music and the historical songs of the Azeri, Gilaki, and Kurdish peoples and later wrote about them. Gilan, with its mountains and greenery, was probably his favourite part of Iran, and he has left us a detailed historical and geographical description. In 1835, he crossed Iran with the Englishman Henry Crestwicke Rawlinson (1810-1865), who copied the magnificent trilingual cuneiform inscription of Darius the Great at Bisitun and, after much study, deciphered it, revealing to European scholars (and eventually also Persian and Arab readers) the ancient languages of Persia and Mesopotamia.²⁴

In Iran, Chodzko also made friends with the Polish exile Izydor Borowski (c. 1770-1838), who had served in the Polish Legions in Italy, with anti-Spanish rebels in South America, with British forces, and finally in the Persian military, fighting against the Uzbeks, the Turkomans, and others. After illustrious service in Persia, where he helped reform the military un­der Fath-Ali Shah (reigned 1797-1834) and his sons, Borowski died in 1838 at the siege of Herat, which aimed to recover it for the Kajars.²⁵

After eleven years (1830-41) serving Russia in Iran, Aleksander Chodzko went to Paris, where he met up with Mickiewicz and other friends from Vilnius, who convinced him to leave the Russian foreign service and in­terested him in the mystical movement of Andrzej Towianski, who turned out to be a charlatan. Under Towianski's baneful influence, and with some confidence because of his loyal service, he wrote to Tsar Nicholas I, asking him to mend his authoritarian ways, to no effect. During the Crimean War (1853-56), Chodzko joined the French civil service and wrote a handbook of Turkish for Allied soldiers; after the war, he applied for the professorship in Oriental languages at the College de France. It went to a Frenchman, but, in compensation, Chodzko was in 1857 given the Chair of Slavonic Literatures, which Mickiewicz had held.²⁶

Chodzko's most fruitful period of Middle East studies was in Paris. He published a major work in English on Azeri folklore - Specimens of the Popular Poetry of Persia as Found in the Adventures and Improvisations of Kurroglou the Bandit Minstrel (London, 1842; 2nd ed., 1864) - which was translated into French (by George Sand) and German. He also published a grammar of Persian, that handbook of Turkish for soldiers, those studies of Gilaki and Kurdish (on the Suleimani dialect), and other books on Persian song and folklore. Also, he wrote on Persian theatre - the famous Tazias, the distinctive Shia religious plays similar to the miracle and passion plays of medieval western Europe.²⁷

Chodzko's work on the Slavonic world followed a similar pattern to his Oriental studies. Chants historiques de l’Ukraine (1879) summarized the longer work on popular historical songs in the original Ukrainian by Volodymyr Antonovych and Mykhailo Drahomanov, adding material on relations with the Turkic world. He also published on old Slavonic legends (1859), on Poland's “southern provinces,” on Bulgaria, and on Russia. As well, he compiled a Grammaire paleoslave (1869) and a great Polish-English Dictionary (1851), the first of its kind. Later he returned to his first love, Persian language and literature.²⁸

Louis Leger, his successor at the College de France, considered Cho­dzko's studies of Persian culture more original and important than those on Slavonic Europe.²⁹ In both fields, however, Chodzko made a solid con­tribution and, despite the growing influence of “positivism” and “organic work,” held on to his Romantic beliefs, including the idea that the essence of any nation or people lay in its language and folklore, especially its historical songs - a concept that moved many other Slavonic scholars of that time (see, for example, Mykhailo Maksymovych in chapter 4 below) and went right back to Herder and the Brothers Grimm. Indeed, that idea may relate to the facts that Chodzko hailed from those same Lithuanian or Ukrainian bor­derlands of Poland as Potocki, Rzewuski, and Chaikovsky and that he, like the latter two in particular, supported the subordinate Polish and emerging Ukrainian cultures and peoples, which were crystallizing new identities. In any event, European knowledge of the Middle East was a quite unexpected beneficiary of this quest, and Chodzkos detailed documentation of Persian, Kurdish, and Azeri languages and dialects, and songs, remains a treasure trove for Iranian ethnographers.

The life and career of another Polish Orientalist from Vilnius contrast starkly with those of Rzewuski, Chaikovsky, and Chodzko. Jozef S⅞kowski/ Osip Senkovsky (1800-1858), who also studied at the university in Vilnius and went directly into philology, early on translated into Polish parts of Dante's Divine Comedy and other works. Studies under Polish historian Joachim Lelewel seem to have turned him to travel literature, where he quickly focused on Turkey and the Middle East. With financial backing from the local Polish Freemasons and the Russian patron of historical studies, Count Rumiantsev, he spent the years 1819-21 exploring Turkey, the Levant, Egypt, the Nile as far south as Nubia, and Ethiopia. He improved his Turkish and Arabic, visited historic sites and ruins such as those at Troy and Baalbek, and explored Egypt's magnificent antiquities.³⁰

On his return to Vilnius, S⅞kowski was offered a new professorship in Oriental studies, but he accepted a similar position at St Petersburg, where he taught for most of his career. Publication of his two-volume compendium of Turkish and other Oriental sources for Polish and Ukrainian history was financed by J.U. Niemcewicz, the famous compiler of historical songs illustrating Polish history.³¹ The work focused on the Kresy bordering on the Islamic world, especially Ukraine with its Cossacks and Tatars, and some materials in it critical of the old Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth aroused strong criticism in Poland; a certain Pietraszewski, in an almanac called Haliczanin (The Galician) in the Austrian sector of divided Poland (partly in today's Ukraine), accused S⅞kowski of falsifying Turkish sources. Yet the French father of modern European Arabic studies, Silvestre de Sacy, praised similar work by S⅞kowski, and most modern scholars, including Olgerd Gorka, a Polish specialist in Crimean history, concur.³²

S⅞kowski later published some of his own critical remarks, especially on some of von Hammer-Purgstall's work, on Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphics, and on Karamzin's history of Russia, which enjoyed wide popularity in that empire, especially in official circles; he also published studies of Egyptian papyri and other matters.

In mid-career, S⅞kowski became an Imperial Russian censor, while si­multaneously writing as Baron Brambeus, quickly becoming known for his biting wit and sarcasm. He renounced his hereditary Polish title and became known as a “careerist” renegade, whose fierce denunciations of Ro­mantic nationalism and revolution completely alienated him from most patriotic Poles, despite being sometimes praised for his lax censorship. By the time he retired, he had alienated even Russian society with his sharp criticisms of the so-called national school of writers such as Nikolai Go­gol and Vassarion Belinsky (the former an idol of the Ukrainian national movement, the latter, of Russian revolutionaries), and with his own, openly satirical history of Russia. Indeed, given his great learning and talent for satirical pedantry, it was often difficult for his innocent Russian readers to distinguish the valuable from the absurd in his writings.

Thus S⅞kowski explained to his astonished public that Nestor's chron­icles of Kyivan Rus' had originally been written in Polish, that Hebrew differs from Chinese only in intonation, and that the ancient Persians spoke Belorussian (Belarusan) and their cuneiform inscriptions can be read only in that tongue! The deeply earnest left oppositionist N.G. Chernyshevsky was taken in by these jests and penned a ferocious rebuttal, although one reviewer of S⅞kowski's two-volume collection of Oriental sources for Polish history had earlier seen that much of his “criticism” of old Poland was no more than “a clever joke.” In the end, the famous Russian emigre Alexander Herzen pointedly called him “the Mephistopheles of Nicholas I's [reaction­ary] era.” Today, he is known better as an influential Russian journalist and literary critic than as the pioneering Polish Orientalist that he once was.³³

Even more than Chaikovsky and Chodzko, S⅞kowski was clearly a child of the Romantic age. But if Byron's struggles for personal freedom and national liberation influenced the first two, S⅞kowski clearly became a defender of Imperial Russia and, like Chateaubriand, de Maistre, and certain others, an enemy of revolution, though without their conviction or religious feelings.