The Poetics of Home: Crimean Tatars in Nineteenth-Century Russian and Turkish Literatures

In the late watercolors of the Russian symbolist Maksimilian Voloshin (1877–1932), Crimea is a double-voiced muse. In radiant blues and vigorous greens, his paintings of the Black Sea peninsula celebrate a muscular natural landscape, a sea and sky bound to jagged peaks and sun-bleached shores. Yet in their paucity of human figures, in their barren trees borne from thin, tremulous brushstrokes, these akvareli also lament a troubled human landscape—one that seems afflicted by what Voloshin calls a “desiccation of human cultures” (“prosykhanie liudskikh kul’tur”) in the poem “Dom poeta” (“House of the Poet” [1926]):

Zdes’, v etikh skladkakh moria i zemli, Liudskikh kul’tur ne prosykhala plesen’— Prostor stoletii byl dlia zhizni tesen, Pokamest my—Rossiia—ne prishli. Za poltorasta let—s Ekateriny – My vytoptali musul’manskii rai, Sveli lesa, razmykali ruiny, Raskhitili i razorili krai.¹

(Here [in Crimea], in the folds of land and sea, Mold had not desiccated the cultures of humankind— The expanse of a century was in the end too narrow, For we—Russia—had not yet arrived. For one hundred and fifty years—since Catherine— We have trampled upon this Muslim paradise, Cut down forests, desecrated ruins, Looted and plundered the land.)

For Voloshin, the human victims of this plunder are the Crimean Tatars, a Sunni Muslim Turkic-speaking people whose khanate ruled Crimea and its environs for over three centuries before being incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1783. Catherine II’s annexation of the peninsula prompted generations of Crimean Tatars to leave their yeşil alda (green island) for the ak toprak (white land) of the Ottoman Empire, but what had begun as a stream of emigrants in the late eighteenth century became a flood after the Crimean War (1853–1856).² At this time, as Aleksandr Nekrich explains, “Tsarist officials [under the leadership of Aleksandr II] brought wholesale charges against the Crimean Tatars for allegedly having helped Turkey [during the Crimean War]. These charges were meant to divert attention from the inept performance of the tsarist government itself, and its bureaucrats, during the war.”³

For Voloshin, who spent a part of his childhood as well as the end of his life in Koktebel’, on Crimea’s southern coast, these charges were nothing less than “barbaric.”⁴ In his words, they forced a “hard-working and loyal” (“trudoliubivoe i loial’noe”) people into a “tragic emigration” (“tragicheskaia emigratsiia”) to Ottoman lands.⁵ Like Aleksandr Herzen, who in 1861 had exposed and railed against the atrocities committed against the Crimean Tatar people by Russian troops after the war in the pages of the newspaper Kolokol, Voloshin issued a scathing indictment of imperial rule of the peninsula over the course of the nineteenth century in an essay entitled “Kul’tura, iskusstvo, pamiatniki Kryma” (“The Culture, Art, and Monuments of Crimea” [1924]).⁶ “One hundred and fifty years of crude imperial rule over Crimea,” he writes, “has pulled the ground out from underneath the feet [of the Crimean Tatars] [vyrvalo u nikh pochvu iz-pod nog].”⁷ It also pulled the wool over the eyes of Russian artists, turning them 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’iu]. This perspective [ton] 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.⁸

Embedded in this critique is a normative understanding of home in the “second Crimea”—what I define, for the purposes of this article, as the Crimea “made of” literary works from the Russian and Turkish traditions.⁹ For Voloshin, there is an isomorphic, one-to-one correspondence between Crimean territorial form—what I call “place”—and Tatar cultural...