Thic Zaporozhians' Letter: A Controversial History

And so it was that even in Abramtsevo, outside Moscow, Repin again turned his attention to Ukraine. It was there in 1878 that Repin did his first sketch (Figure 12) for a great panorama of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, suggested by his friend from Kyiv M.V.

Of course, having read Nikolai Gogol/Mykola Hohol and other Ukrainian authors, and being familiar with the Ukrainian dumas, or reflective songs, Repin knew the basic outlines of Zaporozhian history. He already seemed to fully accept the image of the Cossacks as defenders of popular liberty, as propagated by Romantic authors such as Gogol and Kostomarov, and extending as far back as Voltaire, who famously wrote that Ukraine had always wanted to be free. Repin also may have been aware of the differences between the more cultivated “town Cossacks” of central Ukraine and the more plebeian Zaporozhians of the south, who lived “beyond the rapids” on the Dnieper River and so out of reach of any civil authority. Moreover, he had actually heard of this famous letter, a popular folk motif in many Ukrainian villages.

In 1676, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed (Mohammed in Arabic) IV, whose mother was said to have been of Ukrainian origin, allegedly sent the Zaporozhians a formal letter - complete with his extravagant titles and territorial claims - demanding their immediate submission to him. The Cossacks, led by their otaman, or commander, Ivan Sirko, or, in another version a different commander, were rather amused by this and ostensibly drafted a reply mocking these titles and calling the sultan all sorts of rude, indeed, exceedingly vulgar names. And so, when Repin at Abramtsevo again read a version of this letter in Kostomarov's article, he was seemingly immediately struck by the contrast between dark, absolutist Muscovy, with its restricting, authoritarian traditions, and the bright Ukrainian south, with its irrepressible spirit of liberty.

Repin certainly believed in the document's authenticity, or wanted to, as had the Ukrainian country folk among whom it circulated. But more circumspect historians of both Repin's time and later question whether such an epistle was really sent to the great ruler in Constantinople (today's Istanbul) on the straits separating Europe from Asia. And some historians even question whether such a text was originally written in Ukraine or was perhaps a copy of something drawn up elsewhere.

In Repin's time, two of his closest advisers, the Ukrainian histori­an Kostomarov and then the Cossack specialist Dmytro Yavornytsky, questioned this letter's authenticity, but thought that the legend revealed something very real about the Ukrainian Cossacks, especially the Zapor- ozhians. In Soviet times, the Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Holobutsky (1903-1993) too questioned the document, but printed the Zaporozhians' reply (though not the sultan's letter to them) in full in his history of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, despite heavy censorship by the Soviet authorities.⁹

Holobutsky's contemporaries the literary scholars M.D. Kagan- Tarkovskaia in Leningrad and N.D. Nudha in Ukraine thought the epistle probably original and believed it the model for later letters to the sultan from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Muscovy. But in the 1970s, Daniel Clarke Waugh at Harvard, having created a more accurate chronology of the surviving manuscripts and editions, as well as analysing their content, concluded that the Ukrainian versions of the Cossack letter were copies of an earlier such letter probably composed in the chancellery of the Muscovite state and itself based on an even earlier Polish version produced in the Commonwealth. Ultimately, all of these letters, concluded Waugh, could be traced back to some very real letters from the Ottoman sultans to various sixteenth-century European rulers (especially in the Habsburg

Empire) and official clerks' dismissive responses to unacceptable demands.

Of course, this stingy remark is completely off-base. A Cossack letter did in fact exist from the 1620s on, though based on earlier models. It was copied and circulated throughout the period of the Polish- and Cossack- Ottoman wars and appeared thereafter in many versions, including those later published by Kostomarov, Yavornytsky, and others. Indeed, one of these letters was retranslated into Polish, and even German and English, and publicized all over Europe in the late seventeenth century, especially in the face of the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, when European interest in the subject was very high. So the fame of the Ukrainian Cossacks, and their valour and defiance, became more than a mere legend; it became a firm be­lief both in Ukraine, where versions of the epistle appeared in the Cossack chronicle of Velychko and elsewhere, and also in western Europe, where it gave hope to those struggling against the still very real Ottoman threat.¹¹

Ultimately, of course, the sultan's letter goes right back to the beginnings of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed, who ostensibly wrote to Heraclius, the emperor of Byzantium, Khusrow, the shah of Persia, and the negus of Abyssinia and invited them to submit to the divine law given to the Prophet of Islam. The story of these invitations (as told by the early-tenth-century historian of Islam al-Tabari) was accepted in Muslim tradition, and was augmented by the legendary “Pact of Umar,” allegedly between the Caliph Omar and the besieged Christians of Palestine. Throughout the centuries, Muslim rulers attacking non-Muslim cities and states usually would write such a letter demanding submission and, in accord with the legendary Pact of Umar, offer the protection of the Islamic State and security of person and property to those who would freely submit; such persons could even main­tain their traditional Christian or Jewish religions on condition that they respected Islam, accepted their second-class status, and paid a special tax called the jizya.

The bold Cossack letter ostensibly replied to such a summons. In 1683, it was translated into German, and even English, and gave hope to the defenders of Vienna and all Europe that the Turks would be repulsed, as indeed they were. In this way, the correspondence between the sultan and the Cossacks, although it may have started out with some legendary characteristics, and was not entirely original, became a real factor in European history, in which later Ukrainian historians like Nudha could justly take some pride.

Quite aside from the seventeenth-century English translation, the Cossack letter more recently has been translated into English several times, including by Bernard G. Guerney in The Portable Russian Reader, which was widely read in the English-speaking world during the Cold War.¹³ At this point, I will quote the correspondence in full, both the sultan's summons and the Cossack response, from the translation of Kostomarov's version by Victor A. Friedman, which, despite the translator's untoward commentary accusing the Cossacks of doing nothing but raping, pillaging, and slaughtering defenceless people in pogroms, seems to be the linguistically most professional rendering: