Chapter One

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Imperial Objects

In May 1787, Russian empress Catherine II strode solemnly into what had been for centuries the palace of the Crimean Tatar khan in Bağçasaray, nestled in the Çürük Suv valley in southern Crimea. She ascended the throne of the hansaray, we are told, with “satisfaction.”1 After repeated invasions and abortive treaties Catherine had subdued the Crimean Tatar khanate and annexed its territory to the Russian Empire only years before, in 1783. It was a hotly contested land grab. Across the Black Sea, Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid I still considered himself suzerain over Crimea. He refused to acknowledge Russian control. Months after the annexation, his new grand vizier, Koca Yusuf Paşa, hurriedly summoned a brain trust to Neşatabad Palace along the banks of the Bosporus in Istanbul to discuss, belatedly, “the determination of the Russians to take over Crimea completely” (Rusyalunun Kırım’ı bi’l-külliye zabt etmek iradesi).² An account of the deliberations at Neşatabad reveals that the Sublime Porte had not accepted the loss of Crimea – “ma‘azallahu” (God forbid) – or come entirely to grips with the threat of a Russian Empire scheming to extend its borders “from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.”³

In Bağçasaray, Catherine indeed personified an empire on the march. Her storied journey from Saint Petersburg was an event intended in its grandeur to “add something to the history of Crimea,” as the Latin American revolutionary Francisco de Miranda recalled her words.⁴ Accompanying Catherine was a vast imperial retinue that included Belgian Prince de Ligne (Charles-Joseph Lamoral) and French diplomat Louis Philippe, comte de Ségur. The retinue was not short on pomp or pedigree, but its arrival in the former seat of Crimean Tatar power in Bağçasaray failed to elicit the expected awe and wonder from many local residents. As Ségur recalls in his memoirs, some Crimean Tatars averted their gaze and even turned their backs on Catherine’s procession, “preserving their stupid pride [orgueil stupide], even when they are conquered.”5

Acts of defiance among communities of the colonized are too often absent in the pages of such chauvinistic imperialist writing. If only fleetingly and unwittingly in his memoirs, Ségur cedes space for them. In one vivid episode, the Crimean Tatars of Bağçasaray – who remain mostly entrapped in his account as “subjugated” (soumis) imperial objects deprived of agency – did more than look away in resistance; they confronted him with force. At Ligne’s invitation Ségur had set out on a hunt outside of town to find uncovered Crimean Tatar women. “What pleasure is there in touring a vast garden,” Ligne said to him, “where we are not allowed to examine the flowers?”⁶ After wandering for hours, Ségur and Ligne came upon three women washing their feet in a brook and positioned themselves behind a thicket of trees, ogling like schoolboys. They were quickly discovered. The women screamed, and Crimean Tatar men ran to the scene, flashing daggers and throwing stones. Catherine’s foreign dignitaries, as it were, fled.⁷

Later Ségur attempts a more serious and scrupulous tone. He explains that Ligne unwisely proceeded to regale the imperial retinue at dinner with the story of this encounter to enliven the mood. Everyone erupted in laughter, save a “sévère” Catherine. “You are living among a people conquered by my arms [conquis par mes armes],” she admonished them, “and I wish their laws, their religion, their manners, and their habits to be respected.”⁸ She echoed her lover, fixer, and factotum Grigory Potemkin, who years before had frantically sought to stop grievous abuses of the Crimean Tatar population at the hands of Russian troops by commanding one of his generals, with abundant military circumlocution, to “allow the Tatars to feel the benefits of their current condition.”⁹

Living among the Crimean Tatars provoked not only stern lectures but awkward attempts at poetry by Catherine, including a poem that did not quite model the respect she demanded of her company. In a trifle of verse sent to Potemkin, Catherine reduced the customs and practices of the Crimean Tatars in Bağçasaray to annoyances. They interfered with a good night’s sleep. Resting near one of the mosques of the khan’s palace, her eyes growing heavy, she was roused uncomfortably by the imam’s call to prayer: “Disrupting my sleep in Bakhchisarai / Are shouts [of the imam] and tobacco smoke … Is there here not a place of paradise? [Ne zdes li mesto raia?]”¹⁰

Either by telling raucous, ribald stories or penning rhyming lines, Ségur and Catherine both make clear that the act of representing Crimea upon its absorption into the Russian Empire – at a pivotal time of political and cultural consolidation of imperial authority – was above all an exercise in observing, figuring, and even pursuing the Crimean Tatar Other. To be sure, Catherine sought to project Crimea as part of ancient Hellas reclaimed, renaming the peninsula “Tavrida” (Taurus) and towns like Aqmescit “Simferopol,” as part of a broader “Greek project.”11 But this project was often little more than elite window dressing. As we shall see, the Crimean annexation captured the public imagination most powerfully as a defeat of the exotic Crimean Tatar khanate, not as a “mystical,” as Potemkin put it, resurrection of classical antiquity.¹² Crimea may have been anointed in neoclassical fashion as the new Greece, but it was consumed with Romantic ardour as the conquered land of the Crimean Tatars. After all, empire thrives when the representations of its power to subordinate “natives,” “enemies,” and “barbarians” abound – when it brandishes, in the words of Edward Said, “the authority interposed between the victim of imperialism and its perpetrator.”¹³ In the imperial imagination the most seductive story of conquest is the story of a people conquered.

In such representations, a conquered people is an emplaced people, and a conquered place is an empeopled place – at least at first. Ségur and Ligne, for example, cast Crimean Tatar women as the “flowers” of the Crimean “garden,” and Catherine alludes to the Crimean Tatar sounds and smells seizing the air and the built environment around her. No matter the language or the context, such tropes are commonplace in colonialist literature, which, as a tendency if not a rule, first promulgates a tight, intersectional bond between native cultural content – what I call personality – and territorial form – what I call place – before signalling its breakdown. Instances abound in diverse contexts across the ages. Following the Norman invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century, for instance, Giraldus Cambrensis (also known as Gerald of Wales) featured the Irish as part of the very “topography” of Ireland in his Topographia Hibernica (1186–8), likening them to beasts shaped from birth by the natural world around them.¹⁴ Alexander Pope describes the American Indian in the poem “An Essay on Man” (1734) as a human being through whom the land speaks, a “poor,” “untutor’d” native ensconced “in depth of woods” and attuned to whispers in the wind.¹⁵ In colonialist literatures the world over, we can cite countless comparable examples of this seminal assertion of the bond between place and personality, in which the colonized native is shown communing symbiotically with the colonized territory – and whereby the colonizer, by virtue of this symbiosis, legitimates and confirms his efficient dominion over both.

I use the contested term place in the sense employed by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, as space endowed with affect and cast as a “center of felt value.”16 The equally fraught personality denotes here cultural colouring perceived to fix to a space, conducting “felt value.” Personality, in other words, is the canvas in the frame, or the colour of the walls, or the arrangement of furniture in a room that attests to a particular human presence in space. The bond between place and personality is the fruit of an active process of mutual construction and affirmation that subtends our appreciation of home, or what Heidegger calls wohnen (dwelling) or being in place. Before Catherine’s visit to Bağçasaray, Potemkin deliberately presented Crimea as the home of the Crimean Tatars, refurbishing the hansaray and arranging lanterns around its exterior to conjure an Oriental reverie among her retinue. Upon arriving, Catherine requested a massive company of Crimean Tatar cavalry in full regalia as her personal guard. To inflate its size, Potemkin stuffed the unit with Crimean Tatar civilians and anyone else deemed to resemble them.¹⁷

These gestures direct us to a paradox at the heart of the cultural politics of the Russian colonization of Crimea: namely, that an intimate bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality had to be affirmed in order to be negated. This bond was the ribbon presented to be cut at the ceremonial introduction of colonial power. Like a record or a rule, it was made to be broken. Visually, even poetically, Potemkin and Catherine brought the Crimean Tatar khanate to life in order to extinguish it – in order to fashion their imperial conquest of the peninsula as narrative, as a compelling story and spectacle of change. And the change was swift. As Mary Holderness noted as early as 1821, “[t]he Crim [sic] Tatars, now living under Russian government … are no longer able to exercise their own customs.”¹⁸ This affirmation-negation paradox bears the mark of the colonizer’s original sin; it records what jurists would call prior possession, embedding a claim to the indigeneity of the colonized and a rationale for decolonization inside the very code of empire. In a significant sense, the “structural predisposition”¹⁹ to conflict afflicting Crimea today originates right here.

Reading Russian literature of the long nineteenth century allows us to see this paradox gradually give way to what I call a dialectic of imperial possession, whereby a bond between place and personality is first asserted, then ruptured, and finally reconfigured, with one element of the pair elevated over the other. In Hegelian terms, the bond is aufgehoben (sublated), subject to a sequence in which it is secured, abolished, and then transcended. Literatures of modern empire differ greatly in the ways they inscribe and enact strategies of domination, but this basic dialectic, I would argue, is common to most settler and classical land empires. It is a process akin to a chemical reaction in which works of culture act as either catalyst or inhibitor. In the Russian case, Aleksandr Pushkin’s Bakhchisaraiskii fontan (The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, 1824) asserts the bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality only to break it and initiate an elevation of place over personality that will be perpetuated by his successors. This elevation of place, amounting to what Said describes as a “loss of [the native’s] locality to the outsider,” leads to the apotheosis of Crimea as a paradisiacal garden.20 If Catherine searched in exasperation for a place of paradise in Crimea at the end of the eighteenth century, the trope of a Crimean place as paradise becomes ubiquitous and inescapable in Russian literature a century later. What results from this process is a progressive evacuation of Tatar personality from cultural discourse, a “de-Tatarization” so successful that two of the most prominent Russian works set in Crimea in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, Lev Tolstoy’s Sevastopolskie rasskazy (Sevastopol Sketches, 1855) and Anton Chekhov’s “Dama s sobachkoi” (“The Lady with the Lapdog,” 1899), make no mention of Crimean Tatars at all. Such is the effect of cultural texts facilitating the politics of imperial expansion, the brutal process of seizing a place and substituting the Other’s personality with one’s own.

In 1787, however, Crimea marked a point not only of imperial expansion but also of imperial recession, as an Ottoman ebb accompanied the Russian flow in the Black Sea. For centuries the Crimean Tatar khanate had been for the Sublime Porte a cherished strategic asset that kept the Black Sea a “Turkish lake” (Türk gölü) in the face of such enemies as “deli Petro” (“Mad” Peter I, in Ottoman parlance, for his willingness to sacrifice scores of his troops).²¹ But toward the end of the eighteenth century it had drifted quickly out of the sultan’s grasp. Cascading military and diplomatic defeats at the hands of Russia were to blame, none more crippling than the 1774 Treaty of Küçük-Kaynarca, which formally severed the khanate from Ottoman space and marked the first loss of Ottoman authority over a territory with a majority Muslim population. News of Catherine’s 1783 annexation decree followed soon thereafter, scrambling the sultan’s advisers and precipitating new calls for war. For Istanbul, Crimea was a ground zero of geopolitical decline, a peninsula upon which the entire Ottoman Empire appeared to teeter. The prospect of “conquering” it again – “easily” (müyesser), in the words of one adviser to the sultan – remained on the table for decades.²² Only weeks after Catherine’s return to Saint Petersburg in late 1787, in fact, the Sublime Porte proceeded to mobilize its forces for yet another Russo-Turkish war. A concise Ottoman intelligence report at the time catalogued troop numbers and surveyed the geopolitical lay of the land, singling out for attention “the Tatar tribe on the Crimean island [sic]” (Kırım Ceziresi’nde olan kabail-i Tatar).23 Potemkin had singled them out as well. He forcibly transplanted Crimean Tatars along the coast further inland and beyond the Perekop Isthmus into mainland Ukraine.²⁴

To read Ottoman and Turkish literature over the long nineteenth century is to encounter a dialectic of imperial possession comparable to the Russian case, but with a twist peculiar to a receding empire. As we will see, the Young Ottoman intellectual Namık Kemal testifies to an intimate bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality in the novel Cezmi (1880) before staging an elevation of personality over place that will be taken up by Turkish nationalists like Ziya Gökalp and Mehmet Emin Yurdakul. This elevation is a movement from the specific to the general, from the unique to the diffuse, as the Crimean Tatars increasingly become referred to as “Crimean Turks” in Turkish discourse by the end of the Ottoman period. Abstracting linguistically related ethnic groups with cultural or historical links to what had been the imperial metropole – crafting and co-opting them as transnational “diasporas” – is a common tactic of receding empires or former empires, for whom lost territory fast acquires utility as “civilizational space” with irredentist potential. It is alive today, for instance, in the project of the so-called Russian World (Russkii mir). Reflective of the Kremlin’s “reimperialization” impulse, Russkii mir seeks to connect Russian-speaking “compatriots” (sootechestvenniki) of “similar mentality,” as Russian diplomat Aleksandr Chepurin puts it, across Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and other post-Soviet states – across more than two million square miles.²⁵ A symbol of this project, in the view of Russkii mir proponents like Chepurin, is the poet Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837).

1.

Upon his death in early 1837, Aleksandr Pushkin – riddled with debt, tortured by gossip – was still a giant of Russian culture. Yet one painting, composed around the time of the infamous duel that took his life, presented something of a different view. Pushkin at Bakhchisarai Palace (1837; fig. 3) by Grigory and Nikanor Chernetsov depicts the poet as a man dwarfed by the world around him, swallowed by the space of the hansaray. The painting’s foreground, framed by massive archways, is cast in shadow; its background, a play of stucco walls and flagstones, is bathed in light. The chiaroscuro nearly obscures the figure of Pushkin, who stands not far from the fountain that he helped make famous with the poem Bakhchisaraiskii fontan. Inviting our eyes to move from right to left along a parabola across the canvas, the brothers Chernetsov usher us from the diminutive figure of the poet, past the fountain at the centre of the canvas, and finally to a crescent atop one of the oldest and most revered sites in the khan’s palace, the Demirkapı (Iron Gate).

3. Grigory and Nikanor Chernetsov, Pushkin at Bakhchisarai Palace (1837)

Pushkin at Bakhchisarai Palace is a capriccio, an architectural fantasy of the kind made popular in the Renaissance, in which light and shade collide over the surface of ruins. These ruins could be those produced in the past, like the Roman Forum in the work of Giovanni Paolo Panini (1741), or imagined in the future, like the Grande Galerie of the Louvre in the canvases of Hubert Robert (1796). What the Chernetsovs give us is something else: a ruin that is not yet a ruin. In their vision, the hansaray is splendid in size and structurally impeccable; as space it shows no signs of decay. At the same time, it is eerily lifeless, devoid of human activity beyond the small, stationary poet; as place it is abandoned and empty. In Pushkin at Bakhchisarai Palace, the Crimean Tatar khanate is neither alive nor dead; it is suspended somewhere between disappearance and emergence, morphing from the seat of Tatar sovereignty into a museum of imperial conquest and control. Pushkin, meanwhile, looks out at us with a knowing gaze.

Grigory and Nikanor Chernetsov, in other words, place Pushkin in the flow of the dialectic of imperial possession in Crimea. Theirs is a portrait of the artist as conduit, as a vessel of exchange between what Hannah Arendt calls the “no-longer of the past” and the “not-yet of the future.”²⁶ It is, as far as one poem is concerned, a very perceptive likeness. In Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, Pushkin offers the reader an emblematic performance of the dialectic of imperial possession. With Orientalist colour and sentimental appeal, his poem asserts a bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality and then severs it, elevating Crimean place as ground for Russian colonization. Bakhchisaraiskii fontan is, in one sense, an ekphrastic work: it siphons a vividly realized narrative from a real eighteenth-century marble fountain tucked in a corner of the hansaray. According to legend, the fountain mourns the death of Dilara Bikeç, the beloved of Khan Kırım Giray (Girei in Russian, Geray in Crimean Tatar). Above its mihrab-shaped niche, crafted in a rococo Ottoman style, is an inscription from Qu’ran 76:18, which alludes to the fountain at the centre of the Garden of Paradise named Salsabil, an etymological relation of the Arabic word sabala (to let fall, to shed tears).²⁷

Visitors to the fountain today would be forgiven for their surprise. It defies expectations. In the mind’s eye, Pushkin’s poetic treatment endows the fountain with larger-than-life proportions, but in reality it is modest in size. His mythologization has helped make Bakhchisaraiskii fontan the work of literature with the most transnational resonance in the Black Sea region, a text to which Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, and Crimean Tatar writers have not simply referred but also appealed over the course of centuries. The poem’s reception in the region is profoundly ambivalent. On the one hand, Ukrainian, Turkish, and Crimean Tatar cultural figures do not ignore the poem’s facilitation of the dialectic of imperial possession, its collusion with state power. On the other hand, they value what sets Bakhchisaraiskii fontan apart from nearly all other works of Russian Orientalist literature: its focus not on cunning Muslim tribesmen (cf. Pushkin’s “Kavkazskii plennik”), chieftains (cf. Lermontov’s “Ammalat-Bek”), or rebels (cf. Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat) but on a sovereign political precursor to the tsar, whose dynastic line is the poem’s first word: Giray.

With Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, Pushkin secures the Crimean Tatar khanate firmly in the cultural imaginations of the region, shielding it against eradication in history and memory. In this sense, Ukrainian, Turkish, and Crimean Tatar cultural figures see Pushkin not as a vampire “guzzling until he slides off” his victim, as Andrei Siniavsky once characterized him, but as Midas, one who casts Crimean Tatar personality as a thing of beauty with the touch of his poetic gift but hardens it into an aesthetic object with no life of its own.28 Bakhchisaraiskii fontan is in fact credited for saving the hansaray from demolition in the Stalinist era; as we will see in chapter 3, it is likely the very reason the city of Bakhchisarai still exists as such in name today.

Bakhchisaraiskii fontan is therefore the Black Sea’s literary lodestone. It pulls together an entire region – attracting references, allusions, and imitations across shores and across languages, providing a point of orientation for itineraries to what might be called, borrowing from Joseph Brodsky, the “second Crimea” made of Crimean Tatar, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian poetry and prose.²⁹ Its unique standing was not a matter of Pushkin reaching Crimea first, as it were, after Catherine’s annexation. That distinction was won by Semen Bobrov, whose epic Tavrida of 1798 introduced Crimea as a literary topos to readers in the imperial metropole.³⁰ Yuri Lotman calls Semen Bobrov (1763?–1810) “a poet of genius” – but a poet of genius whose work is virtually forgotten today.³¹

In the words of one Russian critic, Bobrov is Crimea’s literary Columbus, its “pervopoet” (first-poet).³² His Tavrida is “a comprehensive textbook” of the peninsula, an almanac of its culture, mythology, zoology, and geology based on the idea of an intricate, imbricated bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality.³³ The bond is immediately evident at the level of form. Tavrida is the first poem in Russian literature to use an unrhymed iambic metre, and Bobrov accounts for his sonic experimentation as a kind of deference to the Crimean Tatars: “Dear reader! Permit me to confess in jest! I have a Crimean ear, and Crimean Muslims do not like the chimes of bells.”34 He explains that he must explore a new sound, a “Muslim” sound, in order to render Crimea in verse. Here a catalogue of assonant and alliterative Crimean Tatar river names helps him on his way, as his lyrical persona imagines himself one with the clouds, gazing down on the rivers below:

Здесь зрю я Зую, Бештерек,

Индал, Булганак и Бузук,

Что прыгают с крутого камня

Пенистой шумной стопой.³⁵

(Here I behold the Zuia, the Beshterek,

The Indal, the Bulganak, and the Buzuk,

Which leap off the steep rock

In a foamy, noisy throng.)

Human life emerges from this storm in splendour as well – in the figure of Tsulma, a young Crimean Tatar princess in spiritual communion with the land. Bobrov places her in a similative relationship with the flora and fauna around her: Tsulma is as “slender as a myrtle” and as “light as chamois cloth.” Above all she is the “beauty and honour” of the Crimean Tatar nobility, a woman who prays to Allah for the return of her beloved Tatar mirza (noble), Selim. For Bobrov, she exemplifies a deep bond between a living Tatar culture and the territorial bounty of the peninsula. His vision of Crimea as a home of the Tatars in Tavrida becomes an object of aesthetic pleasure to readers in the early nineteenth-century Russian Empire.

Among these enthusiastic readers was Pushkin, who admitted to “stealing” one or two lines for Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, which John Bayley calls his “most popular poem.”³⁶ Its popularity was due in part to its exotic setting in the harem of the Crimean Tatar khan, where “young captives” frolic in cool pools:

Раскинув легкие власы,

Как идут пленницы младые

Купаться в жаркие часы,

И льются волны ключевые

На их волшебные красы.³⁷

(Having let down their fine hair,

Off go the young captives

To bathe in the hot hours,

The waves of the fountain flowing

Over their enchanting beauties.)

The scene is highly intertextual with Bobrov’s Tavrida. Here are Tsulma’s handmaidens, seeking refuge from the heat:

В струи сребристы погружая

Стыдливые красы свои,

Руками влагу рассекают,

Играют, — плещутся, — смеются

…………………………

Купальня хладна защищает

От силы солнечного зноя.38

(Plunging into silvery streams

Their modest beauties,

[The girls] slash through the water with their hands,

Playing, splashing, laughing […]

The cool bathing hut offers protection

From the power of the scorching sun.)

The male gaze of Pushkin’s narrator is invasive, rendering useless the walls of the harem. But like the ogling Ségur and Ligne, Bobrov’s narrator proves even more intrusive and voyeuristic by acknowledging Tsulma’s fear of being seen, but nonetheless refusing to look away:

Тут — робко Цульма озираясь,

Последню ризу низлагает;

Какой красот вид обнажился!

Какой мир прелестей открылся!³⁹

(Here – bashfully Tsulma looks around,

Dropping the last garment;

What a vision of beauty is exposed!

What a world of delights is revealed!)

The cool waters of the bath cannot temper the “burning passion” of the Tatar princess for the distant Selim. Bobrov’s Tsulma is at once desperately romantic and prayerfully modest, offering a source from which the two heroines of Pushkin’s poem – Zarema and Mariia – may be seen to spring.

In Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, these two women are the favoured concubines of the Crimean Tatar khan. Zarema is a passionate woman who desires the khan’s affections but no longer holds his attention; Mariia is a quiet and devout woman who resists the khan but appears to win his heart. In the dead of night Zarema visits Mariia to beg her to release her hold on the khan: “Return to me my happiness and tranquility, / Return my erstwhile Giray.” Mariia and Zarema die after this encounter. They are simply “no more” (“Marii net,” “gruzinki net”; 189–90). Did Zarema really kill Mariia, as the text intimates? Did the khan explicitly order Zarema’s execution? The poem’s incomplete, mysterious feel stands in contrast to its preoccupation with symmetry, which is most evident in the parallelisms oriented around the pairings of Mariia-Zarema and khan-eunuch.

Both Mariia and Zarema, for example, are beautiful captives torn from Christian homes and cast into the khan’s harem. Mariia is a musical woman who is attuned to the world of spirit; Zarema is a woman celebrated in music who is attuned to the world of the flesh: “I was born for passion” (Ia dlia strasti rozhdena; 187). Mariia comes from the Polish lands to the northwest, Zarema from Georgian lands to the southeast. These geographical origins, in fact, are constitutive of the identities of the two women; they define and confine them. Pushkin establishes a tight bond between place and personality in the narrative portion of Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, virtually dissolving territorial form into cultural content. Mariia’s corner of the harem, for instance, is a simulated piece of Poland, a holy refuge where she practises her faith unimpeded and reminisces about her homeland, “an intimate, better place.” She never leaves this chamber alive. Zarema, by contrast, does move beyond her sanctioned area in the harem, eluding the eunuch under cover of darkness to confront Mariia. Yet this act is less a transgression than simple obedience to her fierce, impetuous nature, which she directly attributes to her geographical origins, in an elliptical threat to her rival: “But listen: if I have to […] I have a dagger, / And I was born near the Caucasus” (188).

Zarema makes a point of emphasizing that her place of birth is not Crimea, for the Black Sea peninsula is the land of the Crimean Tatars, and the khan is its metonym, its continguous relation. Often considered a “marginal” figure, a foil to the poem’s two doomed heroines, the khan is in fact the main character of Bakhchisaraiskii fontan.40 Compared to Zarema and Mariia, whose traits dictate their actions, he is the only character to undergo any real change in the poem. He begins the poem as potentate and ends as impotent. In the opening lines, even when troubled, he is portrayed as the fearsome, scowling scourge of Rus and Poland. The prominent caesura in the first line distinguishes his position and his station: “Girei sidel, potulia vzor” (Giray sat, looking downward; 175). The Crimean Tatar khan is literally a sitting monarch, and all look up to him, respecting his authority. Yet by the end of the poem he is a man weak and broken, especially on the field of battle:

Он часто в сечах роковых

Подъемлет саблю, и с размаха

Недвижим остается вдруг,

Глядит с безумием вокруг,

Бледнеет, будто полный страха,

И что-то шепчет, и порой

Горючи слезы льет рекой. (189)

(Often in fateful moments he would

Hoist his sabre, and with a swing

Suddenly stand motionless,

Look around senselessly,

Grow pale, as if seized with fear,

And whisper something, and now and then

Tears of sorrow would flow like a river.)

These inaudible whispers underscore the khan’s silence throughout the story. He has no voice; silently (molcha) does he move about the harem. He communicates in glances and gestures, dismissing his court, for example, “with an impatient wave of his hand.” Now that he can no longer brandish his sword, the khan becomes as mute and emasculated as the eunuch who monitors his harem. Pushkin hints at their affinity, even playing with the masculine rhyme litsa-skoptsa to join the two together:

Забытый, преданный презренью,

Гарем не зрит его лица;

Там, обреченные мученью,

Под стражей хладного скопца

Стареют жены. (189–90; emphasis mine)

(Forgotten, scornfully cast aside,

The harem does not see [the khan’s] face;

There, doomed and tormented,

Under the watch of the cold eunuch

The women grow old.)

Both the khan and the eunuch are figures of authority who hold the lives of the harem in their hands. Their fates are closely intertwined: the eunuch’s every action is determined by a command of the khan, and the khan’s rule and lineage are preserved by the eunuch’s regulation of his concubine.

The symmetry between them invites a reading of the poem with relevance to our understanding of the dialectic of imperial possession, because Bakhchisaraiskii fontain can be understood as a commentary on dynastic succession. Behind the poem’s veil of harem romance and intrigue, in other words, is a story of the failure of the Crimean Tatar khan to protect his line. For Vissarion Belinsky, Pushkin’s work is a simple love story: “The idea of the poem is the rebirth (if not the enlightenment) of a savage soul by way of the lofty feeling of love.”41 Yet the reader never encounters the khan in love at all. Over the course of the poem he shares no intimate moments with Zarema or Mariia. As Baudelaire once said, “in a palace […] there is no place for intimacy.”⁴² The khan professes no affection for either woman. Only in Zarema’s lengthy appeal to Mariia – that is, second-hand – does the reader learn that the khan and his Georgian consort once “breathed happiness in never-ending rapture” (187). Even Pushkin’s narrator is unsure of the khan’s feelings, repeatedly investigating the reasons for his deep malaise: “What drives this proud soul? / What thought occupies him?” (175). Is it unrequited love that has the Crimean Tatar khan brooding intensely in the poem, or fear for the stable perpetuation of his rule?

The problem of succession was not insignificant to Pushkin in this period. His historical drama Boris Godunov (1825), written very soon after Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, centres on the demise of the Riurik line during the Smutnoe vremia (Time of Troubles, 1598–1613). Boris Godunov is a famously fragmentary and “incomprehensible” play, which intrigued and alienated audiences immediately upon its appearance – and which, by Pushkin’s own account, drew its inspiration from Shakespeare.⁴³ Crises of patrilineal succession, one of which gripped Russia at the time of the Decembrist revolt of 1825, are of course never very far from the centre of the Bard’s tragedies and historical chronicles. Macbeth, to cite one prominent example, fears that “upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,/ And put a barren sceptre in my gripe, / Thence to be wrench’d with an unlineal hand, / No son of mine succeeding.”⁴⁴

If endowed with voice in Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, the Crimean Tatar khan might be heard to speak the same fear. Instead he is shown at the conclusion of the narrative portion of the poem silently pushing back against the irrevocable decline of his dynasty. He erects a monument – the fountain of tears of the poem’s title – bound to the sorrow of those mourning the absence of children:

За чуждыми ее чертами

Журчит во мраморе вода

И каплет хладными слезами,

Не умолкая никогда.

Так плачет мать во дни печали

О сыне, падшем на войне. (190)

(Behind its strange characters

Water murmurs inside the marble

And falls in drops like cold tears

Without end.

Thus weeps the mother in the depths of grief

For the son fallen in war.)

In a poem whose story forges an intimate bond between place and personality, the khan symbolizes the khanate itself, a silenced and emasculated sovereign state whose only lasting traces are hand-hewn structures monumentalizing grief and loss.

Pushkin’s elegiac coda, in which the narrator reveals himself as a visitor “from the north” recounting past events, is a meditation on this loss. What was joined earlier in the poem is now riven: Crimean place has lost Tatar personality. Directing his gaze over the grounds of the hansaray, the narrator encounters only a charged silence. Amid the quietude he wonders, “Gde skrylis khany? Gde harem?” (Where have the khans gone? Where is the harem?; 191) He asks these questions with an unspoken knowledge of the answer: namely, that the expanding borders of empire have consigned the khan and the other sovereigns along Russia’s periphery to extinction.

Here Pushkin’s narrator seems struck by an imperial melancholy, a “reflective nostalgia” triggered by the ruins that have been wrought by the advance of empire, by the seizure of place at the expense of the Other’s personality. According to Svetlana Boym, citing Susan Stewart, “reflective nostalgia does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place […] It is ‘enamored of distance, not of the referent itself.’”45 In these rhetorical interrogatives the narrator evokes the absence of the khans, of Tatar personality – not to condemn or mourn it but “to narrate the relationship between past, present, and future.”⁴⁶ In spite of the absence of a living Tatar personality, Crimean place stands in full bloom, overcome by winding vines and reddening roses. Tatar personality is the vanishing past; Crimean place bears the promise of a flourishing future. Progress arrives to the sound of hoof beats:

Волшебный край! очей отрада!

Все живо там: холмы, леса,

Янтарь и яхонт винограда

…………………‥

Всё чувство путника манит,

Когда, в час утра безмятежный,

В горах, дорогою прибрежной,

Привычный конь его бежит,

И зеленеющая влага

Пред ним и блещет и шумит

Вокруг утесов Аю-дага. (192–3)

(O enchanting land! O delight of the eyes!

Hills, forests, sapphire and amber of the vine:

Everything flourishes there […]

All of it seizes the senses of the rider,

As in placid morning-tide,

Amid the mountains, along the seashore,

A trusted steed carries him,

And the greening waters

Stir and sparkle before him

Around the cliffs of Aiu-Dag.)

In this last scene, the narrator projects the Crimean landscape as an object of desire, a place of beauty and vigour to be celebrated, explored, and occupied. It is open and submissive. Unlike Kavkazskii plennik (The Prisoner of the Caucasus, 1822), the narrative poem that immediately precedes Bakhchisaraiskii fontan in Pushkin’s oeuvre and tells the story of the penetration of a Russian soldier into a Circassian mountain community, Bakhchisaraiskii fontan casts the dissolution of the Crimean khanate as an internal matter free of Russian interference.

Pushkin’s elevation of Crimean place over Tatar personality in the coda of Bakhchisaraiskii fontan was epochal in its literary impact. The poet and painter Maksimilian Voloshin (1877–1932) felt it keenly. In his own verse, Voloshin – who spent a part of his childhood as well as the end of his life in Koktebel, on Crimea’s southern coast – condemned his fellow countrymen for “trampling upon this Muslim paradise, / Cutting down forests, desecrating ruins, / Looting and plundering the land.”47 He also lamented how Pushkin’s performance of this dialectic of imperial possession had turned Russian artists from perceptive observers into myopic “tourists”: “The relationship of Russian artists to Crimea has been the relationship of tourists surveying notable places with a painterly eye [zhivopisnost]. This perspective was given to us by Pushkin, and after him, poets and painters over the course of the entire century have seen Crimea only as ‘O enchanting land! O delight of the eyes!’ [‘Volshebnyi krai! ochei otrada!’]. And nothing more. Such were all the Russian poems and paintings composed throughout the nineteenth century. They all worship the beauty of the southern shores with poems abounding in exclamation marks.”48

Voloshin could compile an entire anthology with texts about Crimea that “abound in exclamation marks.” The Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov describes such works as Crimean “souvenir literature” today.⁴⁹ Immediately after Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, Pushkin contributed to this souvenir literature once more with “Otryvki iz puteshestviia Onegina” (“Fragments of Onegin’s Journey”), which was initially intended as canto 8 of Yevgeny Onegin (Eugene Onegin, 1825–32). Here Pushkin portrays Crimea more overtly as a locus and object of sexual longing:⁵⁰

Прекрасны вы, брега Тавриды,

Когда вас видишь с корабля

При свете утренней Киприды,

Как вас впервой увидел я;

Вы мне предстали в блеске брачном:

На небе синем и прозрачном

Сияли груды ваших гор,

Долин, деревьев, сёл узор

Разостлан был передо мною.

А там, меж хижинок татар …

Какой во мне проснулся жар!⁵¹

(You are beautiful, O shores of Taurida,

When one sees you from the ship

By the light of the morning Kiprida,

As I first saw you;

You presented yourself to me in nuptial splendour:

Against a blue, pellucid sky

The peaks of your mountains shone brightly,

The design of your valleys, trees, and villages

Was laid out before me.

And there, among the Tatar dwellings …

What a fire awoke within me!)

Just as the khan’s fountain is all that remains of him, the only vestiges of Tatar personality in this poem are shacks (khizhiny) devoid of human life and activity. Similarly, in Vasily Tumansky’s “Elegiia” (Elegy, 1824), no Tatars are found amid the poem’s surfeit of vibrant flowers, trees, cliffs, and clouds. Only their huts appear, overgrown by the fruits of the land:

Вот жизнь моя в стране, где кипарисны сени,

Средь лавров возрастя, приманивают к лени,

Где хижины татар венчает виноград,

Где роща каждая есть благовонный сад.52

(This is my life in the land where blue cypresses,

Amid aged laurels, entice one to leisure,

Where grapevines top Tatar huts,

Where every grove is an aromatic garden.)

For Vladimir Benediktov, meanwhile, Crimea’s unusual topographical features actually replace its indigenous population. In “Oreanda,” which constitutes part of his 1839 cycle Putevye zametki i vpechatleniia (v Krymu) (Travel notes and impressions [in Crimea]), Benediktov’s lyrical persona anthropomorphizes the land as natives offering visitors shelter from the rain and relief from the hot sun. He looks admiringly on the “living rock faces” near Yalta and demands a human gesture of gratitude for them: a reverent bow.⁵³ Such texts give us Crimea as a kind of fetish object for landscape tableaux, poetic canvases of glimmering peaks and deep ravines whose grandeur leads lyrical personae toward an implicit embrace of colonialism and toward a Romantic experience of the natural sublime.

When war descended upon the Black Sea peninsula in 1853–6, these familiar peaks and ravines became less a source of enchantment and awe than landmarks of sorrow and suffering, especially in Crimean Tatar literature. The end of the Crimean War saw tsarist officials under Aleksandr II level the Crimean Tatars with accusations of mass treason and betrayal. As Nekrich explains, “these charges were meant to divert attention from the inept performance of the tsarist government itself, and its bureaucrats, during the war.”⁵⁴ Voloshin called the accusations “barbaric,”a cruel assault on a “hard-working and loyal” people.⁵⁵ This assault was physical, involving a series of atrocities committed against the Crimean Tatar civilians by Russian troops. Aleksandr Herzen catalogued these crimes in his newspaper Kolokol.⁵⁶ The storm of pressure and persecution turned what had been a gradual, century-long Crimean Tatar migration to Anatolia into a flood. As if in amber, Crimean Tatar folk songs trap the pain of leaving the homeland at this time: “Woe has come to Crimea! / On one side, the Muscovite surrounds us, / On the other side, we face the mighty Black Sea!”57 On the horizon was the ak toprak (white land) of Ottoman Turkey.

2.

Namık Kemal (1840–1888) placed a journey of a Crimean Tatar across the Black Sea at the heart of the first historical novel in Turkish literature. Kemal was the most influential Ottoman intellectual of the nineteenth century and a writer of fiction with a penchant for melodrama. His polemical essays were sober, clear-eyed endorsements of a European liberalism with an Islamic soul – the essence of a Young Ottoman political platform – but his plays and novels expressed such effervescent feeling that they occasionally gave themselves over to caricature.⁵⁸ Compared to Pushkin, who would come to describe Bakhchisaraiskii fontan as the product of a younger self prone to an exaggeration of feeling,⁵⁹ Kemal was a writer who embraced a superfluity of emotion as his literary trademark. It seemed to suit his era. At a time of rapid changes that saw the introduction of the first Ottoman constitution in 1876, Kemal’s passion was in many ways a barometer of societal transition and upheaval. In his literary works it was a catalyst of reform, igniting in audiences a powerful new understanding of and loyalty to vatan (homeland), an originally localized concept that he helped develop to encompass the entire multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire.⁶⁰

In 1880, Kemal published a ground-breaking novel entitled Cezmi. Set in the sixteenth century and originally envisioned as a multivolume work in the vein of Hugo’s Les Misérables, it bears a misleading title. Kemal only completed the first volume, which centres less on Cezmi, the eponymous scholar and poet who becomes a sipahi (special cavalry officer) in the service of Sultan Murad III, and more on Adil Giray, kalgay (heir apparent) to the Crimean Tatar khan. Like Pushkin’s Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, Cezmi holds special importance in our discussion as a text that initially attests to an intimate bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality – in other words, to the status of the Crimea peninsula as a possession of the Crimean Tatars. But it then disrupts this bond, elevating personality at the expense of place.

Cezmi does so to advocate a transcendence of local territorial loyalties in the service of the Ottoman imperial project. The charismatic example of this transcendence is the figure of Adil Giray, who leaves Crimea and crosses the Black Sea to support the Ottomans against Persia. Representing his elder brother and sovereign, Khan Mehmed Giray, Adil arrives at the head of forty thousand akıncılar (light cavalry) just as the Persians are about to rout Cezmi and an undermanned Ottoman infantry. The dramatic entrance of the Crimean Tatars lifts the Ottomans, causing the Persians to give up hope of victory. In their retreat, however, the Persians capture Adil, who is sent to the shah’s palace, where he becomes embroiled in imperial intrigue and a poisonous love triangle.

Kemal derives the narrative events and existents of Cezmi from Tarih-i Peçevi (Peçevi’s history), the authoritative chronicle of sixteenth-century Ottoman history written by İbrahim Peçevi.61 But we might be forgiven for thinking that he was inspired in some way by Pushkin. Cezmi is a mirror image of Bakhchisaraiskii fontan: instead of a Crimean Tatar khan caught between two women imprisoned in his Bahçesaray harem, Kemal gives us an imprisoned Crimean Tatar khan-in-waiting caught between two women in a Tabriz palace.

The first woman in the love triangle is Şehriyar, the wife of the shah, who falls in love with Adil at first sight. She is beautiful, passionate, and vengeful – Kemal’s Zarema. The second is Perihan, the young sister of the shah, who wins Adil’s love and attempts to free him from captivity. She is beautiful, moral, and devout – Kemal’s Mariia. Scheming to turn Bahçesaray against Istanbul, Şehriyar offers Adil full independence for the Crimean khanate and a position of authority in a new Crimean Tatar–Persian alliance. He spurns her advances. Emboldened by his love for Perihan – and by Cezmi, who reappears later in the novel to rescue the Crimean kalgay – Adil devises a plan to overtake the palace and overthow the Persian state. Şehriyar learns of his betrayal, however, and orders the execution of Adil and Perihan before taking her own life. Not unlike Pushkin’s Zarema, she destroys the happiness of a Crimean Tatar beloved – and dies in recompense for the act.

Adil and Perihan perish united in their love. They also perish as a Crimean Tatar and a Persian princess who ultimately sacrifice their lives in service to Istanbul. Although the Crimean khanate “entered under Ottoman protection” in 1478, in practical terms it was a partially independent sovereign polity with control of the Black Sea peninsula and the adjoining northern steppe between the Kuban and the Dniester throughout the sixteenth century.⁶² For a Young Ottoman like Namık Kemal, who sought to elevate a concept of open Ottoman citizenship founded primarily on allegiance to the state rather than to ethnicity or religion, the choice of Adil Giray as a hero of Cezmi therefore had significant political purchase.

Kemal considered imaginative literature a primary means of educating the people of the empire.⁶³ Writing Cezmi between 1876 and 1880, he likely viewed the very survival of the Ottoman Empire as hinging on the lesson of Adil Giray and his decision to sacrifice the local in defence of the imperial. The Balkans were exploding with nationalist sentiment, and in 1877 Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire ostensibly over demands for autonomy for the latter’s Bulgarian population. Even after the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, which helped staunch the excessive bleeding of territorial losses beyond Anatolia, the empire still saw Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania break away as independent states.64 Whatever the concerns Namık Kemal had as a reformer, one who plied the sultan with calls for a Western-style constitutional and parliamentarian government that would remain true to Islamic tradition, they did not diminish his devotion to the Ottoman Empire. With the long-standing borders of the vatan beginning to crumble before his very eyes, he must have dreamt of an army of Adil Girays, impervious to the seduction of the local and to the comfort of home, coming to Istanbul’s aid.

In Cezmi, Kemal does not understate the power of this seduction. He underscores Adil’s affinity for his Crimean homeland and Tatar brethren and does so precisely to extol the heroism involved in the pursuit of an Ottoman “higher calling.” Most illustrative in this regard is a long poem written in Adil’s own voice, which the distinguished Turkish poet, novelist, and literary critic Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar calls the novel’s “biggest peculiarity” (en büyük hususiyeti).⁶⁵ It is, as it were, a “Bildungspoem” offering psychological insight into the life and upbringing of the Crimean Tatar kalgay. It takes the form of a Terkibi-bend, a poem featuring a series of stanzas composed of ten beyts (couplets), each of which concludes with a contrapuntal makta (a “cutting” or end couplet).

Adil begins by contemplating the force that brings him into the world: kaza. The meaning of the term kaza lies somewhere between its denotations as both “chance” and “calling” (or “divine judgment”) – in a word, fate.⁶⁶ While in self-imposed exile in France from 1867 to 1870, Namık Kemal was an enthusiastic reader of the Romantic works of Victor Hugo, and he cast Adil Giray in this poem within the novel as a “fated” Romantic hero caught in the sweep of cosmic forces. Fate for Adil is a presence that speaks to him in the words of a relentless hatif (mysterious voice):

Bilmem ne sebeple vardı dâim,

Gûşumda şu hatifî terâna:

Yüksel ki yerin bu yer değildir,

Dünyâya geliş hüner değildir.⁶⁷

(I do not know why there has always been

This mysterious voice in my ear:

“Arise! This is not your place,

There is no merit in simply being born.”)

Nearly every makta – the concluding couplet of each stanza – begins with the imperative “Yüksel!” (Arise!) and encourages Adil to exceed himself and advance beyond his current station.

As the poem continues, Adil reflects on his upbringing in Crimea, which taught him the difference between strength and weakness and between intelligence and wisdom. At the right hand of his brother, Khan Mehmed Giray, Adil turns his attention to the affairs of the Crimean Tatar khanate: “My brother became khan of Crimea, / And drew me to the throne with him” (99). The people praise him and find “none of [his] orders contemptible”:

Herkesteki hande-i neşâtın

Aksiyle açardın dilde güller.

Hükmümde safâ süren raiyyet,

Evsâfımı virdederdi yer yer.68

(Roses bloomed in the hearts of men,

Reflecting the joyous laughter of all.

Under my authority my subjects lived in bounty

And always applauded my qualities.)

Adil Giray feels a devotion to and an intimate connection with his home, expressing a strong resolve “not to abandon” (terketmemek) Crimea and his fellow Crimean Tatars. His life to this point – a childhood idyll, an adolescent quest for knowledge – has readied him for a position as a leader and a steward of Crimean Tatar society on the Black Sea peninsula. In other words, Adil is at home.

When the hatif reappears with a new appeal for ascendance, however, this bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality is shaken: “Arise! The world is base and destitute; / It is madness to be inclined toward it” (Yüksel ki cihan sefîl ü dundur, / Rağbet ona âdeta cünundur).⁶⁹ The hatif calls on Adil to serve his ethnic brethren in the Ottoman Empire. Kemal fashions a new home for his Crimean Tatar hero. The very next couplet testifies to Adil’s submission to the interests of the broader vatan: “The Ottoman dynasty declared war against the enemy; / For those who spoke of bravery, here was its arena.”⁷⁰ Adil Giray forsakes Crimean place, to which he will never return, and goes forth to fulfil his civic duty as a Crimean Tatar noble bound to Istanbul. Kemal thus decouples Crimean place from Tatar personality, elevating the latter as the condition of possibility for the uhuvvet (brotherhood) at the heart of this allegiance. In an era when ethnic and confessional differences began to undermine the territorial integrity of the Ottoman lands, Cezmi mobilized a Crimean Tatar as a symbol of unity whose support of the Ottoman state was a triumph over division. For Kemal, this loyalty was the hope of his brand of Ottomanism.

Kemal’s ideas were highly contested in this period of mass migrations, fluid borders, and proliferating ideologies. In fact, the most persuasive critique of his Ottomanism came from a member of the Muslim intelligentsia in the Russian Empire. In an influential pamphlet entitled Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset (The three paths of policy, 1904) and published in the Cairo-based journal Türk, Yusuf Akçura wonders whether Kemal’s Ottomanism really suits the reality of the turn-of-the-century Ottoman Empire. A Volga Tatar, Akçura deliberates the pros and cons of three political ideologies, each promising to serve the interests of an Ottoman state in crisis: Ottomanism, Islamism, and pan-Turkism. For Akçura, the prospects for Kemal’s doctrine are dim, mainly because its platform of open citizenship and equal rights constitutes a surrender of political privilege for Turks and Muslims, on the one hand, and a disavowal of self-determination for non-Muslims, on the other.71 After considering Islamism, which he argues would alienate and anger European powers with a destabilizing offer of a “more concentrated community” of Muslims across borders, he sees a potential upside in a new, less-tested ideology: pan-Turkism.⁷²

Akçura describes Türkçülük as a policy of ethnic nationalism encompassing “all the Turks found scattered across a large swath of Asia and Eastern Europe and bound by the same language, ethnicity, culture, and to a significant degree, the same religion.”⁷³ Its ambition worried journalist and politician Ali Kemal, who questioned its practical implications by citing the Ottoman loss of Crimea and the fate of the Crimean Tatars. “My God, we could not protect Crimea when it was inhabited by the Tatars, a type of Turk [Tatarlar ile, bir nevi Türklerle],” wrote Ali Kemal, “and now we are going to work to unify all the Turks in Asia?”⁷⁴

This “loss of Crimea” evolved into a pregnant poetic trope in turn-of-the-century Turkish literature, albeit not quite in the way Ali Kemal had in mind. It became an event cited by poets to advocate versions of Akçura’s Türkçülük and to stir outrage over the failure of the Ottoman state to protect Turks around the world. One such poet was Ziya Gökalp, the influential sociologist and civic activist who defined the concept of the nation according to the bonds of “culture” (hars) rather than the boundaries of territory, in his Türkçülüğün esasları (The Principles of Turkism, 1923).75 Called “the founding father of [both pan-Turkism] and Turkish nationalism,” he began his career warmly supportive of pan-Turkist ideals, which are most evidently expressed in his poetry. Later, after the Ottoman defeat in the First World War in 1918, he narrowed the focus of his political program to Anatolian Turkey.⁷⁶ His writing has since maintained a consistent salience in Turkish society. When Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan read Gökalp’s poetry in public in 1997, it even earned him a trip to prison.

Gökalp’s early poems deliver the ideas he puts forward in his academic writing in simplified, digestible form. They bear the steady cadence of a march and call out for memorization and oral recitation. With abundant internal rhyme, his early poem “Altın Destan” (The golden epic, 1911) begins by evoking the wider Turkic world as one of an unattended flock in need of a shepherd. His lyrical persona wanders through Turan, a mythical territory of Turkic peoples extending from Anatolia into Asia, and searches for stirrings of a new movement for unity. Instead he sees only lands “where foreign hands have built principalities,” Crimea foremost among them:

Kırım nerde kaldı, Kafkas ne oldu?

Kazan’dan Tibet’e değin rus doldu.⁷⁷

(Where was Crimea abandoned, what happened to the Caucasus?

From Kazan to Tibet, the land is stuffed with Russians.)

Turan in Gökalp’s poem is a landmass so large and so abstract that it renders the concept of place meaningless. Its expansive borders reach Crimea, Tibet, and even the Tian Shan mountain range. This is space without a centre, with no specific where to invest felt value.

Originally a Persian term for Central Asia, Turan has been described as “an undefined Shangri-La area in the steppes of Central Asia.”⁷⁸ This lack of definition is only territorial. What really defines Turan is culture, the aggregate of social, linguistic, and confessional traits privileged by Yusuf Akçura. Its borders are the borders of whatever is understood as the Turkic world. For Ali Kemal, responding to Akçura, the loss of Crimea is instructive because of its territorial specificity and proximity to Istanbul; for Gökalp in “Altın Destan,” it is instructive because of its lack of specificity, its capacity to be emblematic of countless other losses, from the Caucasus to Kazan.

This apotheosis of personality over place is especially evident in the work of the “first nationalist poet of Turkey,” Mehmet Emin Yurdakul, for whom the loss of Crimea also figures as an instrument of pan-Turkist mobilization.79 In “Nifâk” (Discord, 1912), Yurdakul cites Crimea as an admonition. It is pluralized, a floating signifier: “O lamp of history! Give light to us […] / And show us […] how many miserable Crimeas there are [kaç zavallı Kırım var].”⁸⁰ In his 1914 epic “Ey Türk Uyan!” (Awake, O Turk!), whose title echoes the nineteenth-century anthem of pan-Slavism “Ej Slovane” (Hey, Slavs!), he encapsulates the central idea of pan-Turkism:

Bu saf kanı taşıyan

Herbir insan, aşiret;

Türk diliyle konuşan

Herbir şehir, memleket

Senin birer evladın, senin birer oymağın;

Senin birer öz yurdun, senin birer bucağın!⁸¹

(Every person, every nomadic tribe

Carrying this pure blood;

Every city, every civilization

Speaking the Turkish tongue

Is your descendent, your tribe,

Your place, your true home!)

Yurdakul explicitly casts place (yurt) as wholly contingent on personality (bu saf kani taşıyan / Herbir insan). In his formulation, surrendering to the thin bonds of ethnicity, language, and culture among the Turkic peoples will lead to a discovery of a new home, a new “Türk yurdu” encompassing the Kirgiz, Tonguz, and “wet-browed Tatars” (alin terli Tatarlar).⁸²

Aiding this discovery is what Yurdakul calls a new “national spirit” (milli duygu), which is conveyed by Sur, the trumpet announcing the Holy Kingdom in Qu’ran 6:73. He heralds national awakeners who have changed the map of Europe, including Russia. Armed with “national spirit,” after all,

Tatarlar’a harac veren bir Rusya

Şark’a varis olmak için canlandi.⁸³

(Russia, which once paid tribute to the Tatars,

Came alive to become heir to the East.)

Among these national awakeners, Yurdakul reserves a special place for Ismail Gasprinsky (or İsmail Bey Gaspıralı, 1851–1914), the Crimean Tatar educator, journalist, and civic leader based in Bahçesaray whose journal Tercüman (or Perevodchik; The Interpreter) played a singular role in promoting pan-Turkist ideals in both the Russian and the Ottoman Empires.

The motto of Tercüman – “Dilde, fikirde, işte birlik” (Unity in language, thought, and action) – encapsulates Gasprinsky’s mission, which was nothing less than to consolidate the interests and the resources of the Turkic communities around the world, from the Tatar to the Uzbek and Kirghiz, and to ready them for the modern age. Gasprinsky advocated lisan-ı umumi (the common language), a hybrid of simplified Ottoman Turkish and Crimean Tatar largely free of Persian, Russian, and Arabic influences and capable of reaching Turkic audiences across borders; he promoted the rights of women and an Islam reconciled to the secular ideals of the European Enlightenment; and he called for usul-i cedid, a “new method” of Muslim educational practices critical for civil society.84 These positions became the central tenets of what is known as Jadidism.

In his “İsmail Gaspirinski’ye” (To Ismail Gasprinsky), published in 1914 in the collection Türk Sazı (The Saz of the Turk), Yurdakul hailed Gasprinsky not only as a national awakener but also as a unique light-bearer to the Muslim world, one who spread both nur, the “light” of religious faith, and medeniyet güneşı, the “light of civilization.”⁸⁵ He wrote the poem upon the occasion of Gasprinsky’s death in 1914. The two had been friends. In 1899, for instance, Yurdakul sent Gasprinsky a copy of his first collection of verse, Türkçe Şiirler (Poems in Turkish, 1898), which the latter received with gratitude, remarking that the poems “cheered” and “heartened” him.⁸⁶ Marking the passing of his friend in “İsmail Gaspirinski’ye,” Yurdakul offered a prayer for Crimea among the poem’s first stanzas:

Ta ki fatih Cengizler’in evladı

İslavlık’ın pençesinden kurtulsun;

Onun mazlum, sefil olan hayatı

Hür ve mes’ud bir tali’le can bulsun.

(Let [Crimea,] son of Genghis the Conqueror

Escape through the talons of the Slavs;

Let independence and a blessed soul

Greet its oppressed, wretched life.)

Here the loss of Crimea is the result of an egregious theft by “the Slavs.” Under Russian control, Crimea is a land “kneaded with blood,” “a slave to savages.” This virulent anti-Russian rhetoric, in which Gasprinsky himself did not engage, appears in a number of Yurdakul’s poems from this period: in “Petersburg’a” (To Petersburg, 1916), for example, the lyrical persona curses the residents of the imperial city as ignorant idol worshippers, with imagery evoking the apocalyptic scenes of Qu’ran 81, and in “Çar’a” (To the Tsar, 1917) he warns the Romanov “Nero of Russia” (Rusya’nın Neron’u) of a coming revolutionary resurgence of Crimea.87 Yet in “İsmail Gaspirinski’ye” this antipathy toward Russian power quickly makes way for an encomium to Gasprinsky, who “dared to do great, sacred work” on behalf of pan-Turkist ideals.

Yurdakul praises Gasprinsky as, above all, “a great Turk” (ulu Türk). He detaches Tatar personality from Crimean place and elevates it to such an extent that it loses its distinctiveness, its particular cultural and historical colouring. This move from Tatar to Türk is critical to our understanding of the cultural dynamics in the region of the Black Sea at this time. Whereas “the term Tatar had a specific territorial component […] the term Türk did not,” as Uli Schamiloglu explains.⁸⁸ This terminological evolution was another deterritorialization, dilating and diluting Crimean Tatar personality. In Crimea it prompted a backlash from a new generation borne in Ismail Gasprinsky’s shadow, who would soon speak a language of political authority along the corridors of the hansaray once more.