Литературно-художественные произведения by Исмаила Гаспринского, and: Ран-няя публицистика: 1879–1886 by Исмаилa Гаспринского, and: Публицистика: 1887–1890 by Исмаила Гаспринского (review)

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a novel ideological climate began to emerge among Russian Turkic intellectuals, which would challenge the long history of community commitment to the teachings of Islam for social organization and public policies. The earliest impetus for this may be found scattered about the South Caucasus, Crimea, and the Volga-Ural region where largely secular devotees closely linked to developments within the larger Russian Empire began to ponder and act upon the need for an epistemological break with the past. Some of the identifiable figures who appear to fall within this group between the 1840s and 1880s were Mirza Fatali Akhund (1812–1878), Abbasgulu Bakikhan (1794–1847), Mirza Muhammad Ali Kazim-bey (1802–1870), Gasan Bey Melik Zerdabi (1842–1907), and Abdulqayyum Nasyri (1825–1902). The most instrumental and influential of these intellectuals, however, was the Crimean Tatar Ismail Bey Gasprinskii (1851–1914), who called home the small town of Bakhchisarai, once the ruling site of the Crimean Khanate that had competed with its Russian neighbors to the north from the fifteenth to late eighteenth centuries.

Gasprinskii was a Sunni Muslim by birth, grandson of a member of the Muslim clerisy who ministered to Tatar troops in the Russian army during the Napoleonic Wars, and son of a military aide-de-camp who served as translator for the Viceroy Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov (1782–1856) during the decades of conflict with the forces of Sheikh Shamil, the third imam of Dagestan. As was typical for a Muslim boy, he was taught for several years by a local hoca (teacher) responsible for introducing him to the Arabic script, but not the Arabic grammar, and then training him in rote learning so as to be able to "read/recite" the Qur'an in its original language. As he complained later, this was a fruitless exercise, and likely the impetus for his all-consuming focus on educational reform.¹ Much more instrumental in his own education was his subsequent two-year enrollment in the Russian gymnasium in Simferopol followed by attendance in imperial military academies in Voronezh and then Moscow, the latter between 1865 and 1867. By all accounts, his Russian-language writing skill surpassed his Tatar-language writing for the duration of his life, despite his returning home at the age of sixteen and never moving away thereafter except for roughly eighteen months traveling and residing in France and the Ottoman Empire. The most striking evidence of his inability to write in Tatar was his publication of Perevodchik/Tercüman, the Russian/Tatar newspaper for which he produced the Russian texts but had an assistant prepare the Tatar version of each issue.²

Gasprinskii always identified himself as a Muslim while adhering to the religion's ethical and moral teachings, but his familial subaltern roots, which meant service to and with the Russian Empire, pushed him toward the larger culture that, in the throes of post-Enlightenment liberal thought, secularism, and modernity, was Russia's. In many ways a child of the 1860s, he emerged from the Moscow Military Academy troubled by deeper questions about identity, national policy, and international affairs, all rooted in what had already become a call to arms, particularly among Russia's university students: Chto delat'? ("What is to be done?"). The autobiographical tale Gün Doğdu: Yeni Zaman ve Yeni Kişiler (Sunrise: A New Time and a New People), that he published in 1886 as one of his earliest fictional pieces, offers a set of personal and intellectual revelations not exposed elsewhere in the sources. In the most instructive episode, the narrator details events from the late 1870s and early 1880s through the eyes of the story's hero, Danyal Bey (both narrator and Danyal Bey are Gasprinskii), and relates the emergent activism in his soul that was given shape by his...