Scholars, Writers and Artists, and a Pilgrim (1870-1914)

By the 1870s and 1880s, the Romantic sensibility was disappearing in most of Europe, and in Poland, Ukraine, and eastern Europe, most members of a new generation were pursuing national objectives in a much less revolutionary way.

Aleksander Jablonowski (1829-1913) was a Polish historian of the Slavonic national awakenings. When studying the Balkan South Slavs, he noticed strong Turkish influences on their cultures. He participated in the Pol­ish uprising of 1863-64 and was jailed for a while, but afterwards worked for a rich Polish family in Kyiv and became more and more interested in Ukrainian history. He made two great trips through the Middle East, in 1869-70 and in 1886.

On the first journey, Jablonowski and his brother, a doctor working in Turkey, traversed Anatolia to Kurdistan, Syria, and Iraq; then went on to Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt.

Ahatanhel Krymsky (1871-1942) (Figure 1) was the region's first and only modern and professional “Orientalist” scholar during this last period before 1914. Though from a thoroughly russified family, he was of Crimean Tatar background and grew up among the Ukrainian people, and he consciously chose to serve both peoples. At the Halahan College in Kyiv he imbibed the egalitarian spirit of the Ukrainian national movement. Teacher Pavlo Zhytetsky introduced him to the federalist and socially radical ideas of the Ukrainian emigre scholar Mykhailo Drahomanov, and the young Krymsky quickly adopted them. Already interested in “the East,” he studied next at the Lazarevsky Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow and was soon sending Ukrainian-language articles and translations to Austrian Galicia, which allowed publication in that language. He collaborated closely with the radical western Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko, with whom he shared many political and social ideas.³⁵

After graduating, Krymsky received a stipend to perfect his knowledge of languages in the Middle East and in western Europe. He fell in love with Lebanon and its people, so spent both years there, improving his classical Arabic, gathering materials on the “modern” Arabic literatures, and com­posing Ukrainian poetry in an Oriental style, which became Palmove hillia (Palm Leaves), published much later, compared in style by one American scholar to Goethe's West-ostlicher Divan.³⁶

On returning to Russia, Krymsky continued at the Lazarevsky Institute and at Moscow University while exploring Ukrainian studies and general history.

Krymsky published mostly in Russian, though still sending Ukrainian- language articles to Galicia for publication. He was a prolific scholar, as well as a poet and a prose writer. His many lectures in Arabic, Persian, and Turk­ish literature and history were gathered into collections and published for his students, who lacked such preparatory materials. Krymsky also wrote on Islamic subjects for the Entsiklopedicheskii slovar Brokgaus i Efron (The Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Brockhouse and Efron) and the Granat. Leo Tolstoy remarked that he himself “read the Koran according to Krymsky.”³⁷

Krymsky's pamphlet in both Russian (1899) and Ukrainian (1904) - The Muslim World and Its Future - called for the modernization of Islamic culture and institutions, especially those within the Russian Empire. These ideas also inspired his close relationship with Ismail Bey Gasprinsky (or Gaspirali), the so-called national awakener of the Crimean Tatars and leader of the Jadidist (modernist) movement among Muslims in the Russian Empire, which urged education for the Islamic peoples, still wed predominantly to older, religious ideas about culture and society. Krymsky, who considered himself one with these peoples, was quite critical of such “religious fanaticism” (his term), although he studied and greatly admired the religious poetry produced by the Sufis and other Persian poets. Parallel to these activities, he supported the growth of literature and spread of higher education among Ukrainians, even writing a text on Ukrainian grammar, and he seems to have seen both of these causes as “anti-imperialist” or at least “anti-colonial.”³⁸

During the Russian Revolution, Krymsky moved from Moscow to Kyiv, where, after the collapse of the imperial order and censorship and the declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1918, he helped found a Pan­Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, to promote research and its publication in the Ukrainian language, and became the academy's permanent secretary.

The 1930s saw Stalin's physical destruction of the Ukrainian Academy, the exile or execution of most of its leading members, and the complete russification of whatever was left. Krymsky himself was forced out of Kyiv and had to retire to the countryside. In retirement, he reworked his ear­lier manuscripts and materials, which were published by Soviet printing houses decades later, after Stalin's death. They included a new history of Arabic literature and a book on the Persian poet Nizami and his contem­poraries, which came out under the auspices of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences. The Ukrainian Academy, which also recovered somewhat during this cultural “thaw,” published Krymsky's Tvory (Collected Works) in five volumes, including his literary efforts with Eastern motifs and his scholarly studies of the Islamic world.⁴⁰ His multi-volume “History of the Khazars,” the first such work ever written, is said to have remained unpublished in the Academy archives.

Of the eight artists and writers we consider in this subsection, Stanislaw Chlebowski was undoubtedly the most closely bound to the Middle East and spent the longest time there, being known much better outside Po­land and Ukraine than inside. Stanislaw Chlebowski (1835-1884) was born to a Polish family in Podolia in right-bank (western) Ukraine. He stud­ied painting in Odessa and St Petersburg and in Paris, where he worked briefly under the outstanding “Orientalist” painter Jean-Leon Gerome. But in 1864, the Ottoman sultan, Abdul Aziz, invited him to Istanbul to be his court painter. There he had to please the sultan with works that his employer commissioned and often supervised, but even so he completed memorable pieces on historical themes, and also on street life in the Otto­man capital and elsewhere - perhaps most notably Mehmed the Conqueror Entering Constantinople in 1453 (1873) and The Sultan Beyazet as a Captive of Tamerlane (1878). He also rendered battle scenes touching on Polish-Otto­man relations, such as The Battle of Mohacz (took place 1526) and The Battle of Varna (of 1444). Chlebowski eventually tired of painting only for the sultan and returned to Europe, and finally Poland, where he died, not quite fifty. He never did return to his native Podolia in western Steppe Ukraine.⁴²

Unlike Chlebowski's, Jan Matejko's stay in Turkey in 1872 was extremely brief. Jan Matejko (1838-1893) was a native of Cracow, which he loved, and never left for any length of time. Nevertheless, under the influence of a story Chlebowski told him, he painted two watercolours, both on the theme of the Bosphorus. One of them depicted a sultan's concubine, a young woman from historical Poland, which included Ukraine, being thrown into the water to drown, a victim of her own indiscretions and harem intrigue.

Jozef Brandt (1841-1915) was fascinated by Eastern themes. His specialties were battle scenes and depictions of horses and cavalry charges, especial­ly those involving Cossacks and Tatars. Many of his canvases portrayed Zaporozhian Cossacks, whom many Europeans considered every bit as exotic as Persians or Arabs and who on occasion also took on Oriental char­acteristics themselves. For example, A Mounted Arab Carrying a Child and Testing a Horse, the latter portraying a man in a turban and Oriental dress, both merged his interests in horsemanship and Eastern themes. The same was true of his Return from the Battle of Vienna (1869), where the victors were carrying back to Poland Oriental loot, including camels, captured at Vienna, and Fightfor the Turkish Standard (1905) (Plate 6), which depicted in a very realistic way a closely fought equestrian battle between gentry of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Turks. Mounted Zaporozhian Cossacks were also a favourite topic of his. All these works reveal his close attention to the details of Eastern weaponry and dress.⁴⁴

A major canvas by the Ukrainian-born and much-admired painter Ilya Repin (1844-1930) - Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Satirical Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1878-91) - successfully combined authentic Ukrainian faces and elements with an Oriental theme (see chapter 9, below). It became the best-known Ukrainian painting of all time, a favourite of both Tsar Alexander III and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. His Ukrainian contemporaries proudly thought that Repin's technique far surpassed that of Jozef Brandt, and that his Cossacks were much more authentic. Certainly, he paid just as much attention to the details of Oriental weaponry and dress, and the faces of his Cossacks were less stylized and more realistic, taken from real-life descendants of the Cossacks themselves. In every respect, Repin's superiority as a portrait artist showed in this great canvas, although he never captured movement in the way that Brandt did. Repin visited the Holy Land only very briefly in 1898, but his friend and close collaborator the historian Dmytro Yavornytsky (1855-1940), whom the artist painted into his iconic picture as the scribe writing that mocking letter to the sultan, actually toured Greece, Turkey, and Egypt, where he met up with the great poet Lesya Ukrainka.⁴⁵

Lesya Ukrainka (1871-1913) was the pen name of Larysa Kosach, born the niece of political philosopher Mykhailo Drahomanov, who helped shape her education; she grew up in a cultured, activist family and knew some­thing of about ten languages (see Figure 2). Ukrainka went to Egypt in 1909, seeking a warm climate and relief from the tuberculosis that would soon kill her. But while there, she quickly furthered her serious interest in the local antiquities and in ancient Egyptian inscriptions, and her stays there informed her cycle of poetry Vesna v Yehypti (Spring in Egypt, 1910), of which the most famous poem, “Hamsin,” evokes the hot wind and sand­storm blowing in from the desert. These poems supplemented her earlier writing on Middle Eastern themes, both biblical and Islamic.⁴⁶

Moreover, through letters to her first cousin, Ariadna Drahomanova, and her husband, the Galician Ukrainian impressionist painter Ivan Trush (1869-1941), Ukrainka aroused the interest of that artist in the Middle East and inspired him to visit Egypt and Palestine. In 1912, he spent two full months there executing numerous pictures of Egypt's antiquities and peo­ple, especially night scenes; the Sphinx by moonlight fascinated him. Trush never forgot that sojourn and returned to the subject later. His personal cat­alogue of paintings lists over fifty on Middle Eastern themes, little studied to the present.⁴⁷

Similarly, the Ukrainian painter from Poltava, Mykola Yaroshenko (1846­1898), like Lesya Ukrainka mortally ill with tuberculosis, visited Italy, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. His paintings from his journeys have also attracted little attention. He was a marvellous portrait artist, and a striking painter of genre scenes and mountain landscapes. (He lived the last years of his life near Kislovodsk in the Caucasus, where he died.) His portraits of young university students, especially Kursistka (The Female Student), are quite striking, and those of prominent figures, such as the painters I.N. Kramskoi (from Sloboda Ukraine) and Mykola Gay, or Ge (from Poltava), and the writer Vladimir Korolenko (from Volhynia) are also very good. For the Russian public, how­ever, his depictions of the Muslim-majority High Caucasus, with its exotic flavour, were probably his closest association with “the Orient.”⁴⁸

Danylo Mordovets/Daniil Mordovtsev (1830-1905), the descendant of a Zaporozhian Cossack, grew up in the Saratov region of Russia, but remained a Ukrainian Cossack patriot. He knew many prominent Ukrai­nians, such as the poet Shevchenko and the historian Kostomarov, and he wrote many stories and novels in both Ukrainian and Russian on Cossack themes and also addressed Tatar slave-taking. In the 1880s, he travelled throughout the Middle East as well as western Europe; his writings include “A Trip to the Pyramids,” “A Trip to Jerusalem,” “Across Italy,” “Across Spain,” and “A Guest of Tamerlane.”⁴⁹

Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky (1865-1944) was the head (1901-44) of the Ruthenian Greek Catholic church in Austrian Galicia, which region fell to Poland after the First World War and a briefer Ukrainian-Polish conflict. He was the scion of an aristocratic Ruthenian-origin Polish family long con­nected with the Greek Catholic church. Consequently, when the Ukrainian national movement arose in the late nineteenth century, he accepted his role as a national leader, the shepherd of his Galician Ukrainian flock, who tried to bridge Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Having gone to Palestine pri­vately the previous year, in 1906 he organized a great pilgrimage of some five hundred Galician Ukrainians and sixty-six Poles to the Holy Land (see Figure 3). Afterwards, with the twelfth-century pilgrim Igumen Daniel of Chernihiv (see chapter 1, above) in mind, the prelate commissioned two of the clergymen to write about the pilgrimage: “How the Ruthenians Walked in the Footsteps of Daniel.” The learned and saintly Sheptytsky, mediator between East and West, is indeed a fitting figure with which to end our survey. A few years later saw the start of the First World War, which blocked access to the Middle East to all but essential personnel. The ensuing four years of conflict ended the Ottoman Empire and transformed the Middle East, to say nothing of what it did to Russia and Ukraine.⁵⁰