But God did not listen. Mickiewicz raised many armies and participated in multiple uprisings for Polish independence. He hoped that France, where he delivered a series of stirring lectures in the early 1840s, would save the world. Repeatedly disappointed, he invested his much-tested faith in 1855 in Russia’s defeat by Western Powers allied with Turkey. In Istanbul, he threw himself into efforts to strengthen the ‘Ottoman Cossacks’, a legion raised from emigrants and Polish prisoners of war. Assisting him in this task was another writer, Micha? Czaykowski, who had participated in the failed Polish uprising of 1831, and had lived in Istanbul since 1851 with his wife Ludwika, an old friend of Mickiewicz from Lithuania. Czaykowski in fact had converted to Islam and, joining the Turkish army, had become General Sadyk Pasha.
Mickiewicz, refusing all offers of finer accommodation, holed up in a small room in Tarlabas??, an old immigrant neighbourhood in the heart of Istanbul. He felt at home in Turkey, which he said reminded him of his native land. Also, Polish émigrés like him were exposed to none of the hostility and suspicion they encountered among authorities in France.
The Ottoman Empire had offered refuge to Polish exiles since Catherine and Frederick partitioned Poland in the late eighteenth century (a Polish village founded in 1842 still exists near Istanbul). During his travels through Crimea in the 1820s, Mickiewicz had developed a fraternal feeling for Muslims who had been conquered and humiliated by Catherine’s Russia at the same time as Polish Catholics. In Istanbul he insisted that Jews among the Ottoman Cossacks form a separate legion: the ‘Hussars of Israel’, as he anointed them. Jewish militancy in his view would galvanize not only Jewish masses across Russia but also the passive Christian peasantry of Poland and Lithuania: ‘We shall,’ he said, ‘spread like lava with our continually growing legion.’
Much to Mickiewicz’s delight, a synagogue was opened in the Cossacks’ camp, and a fine military uniform designed for the Hussars of Israel by a Jewish officer. But his partner, a Muslim convert in command of both Jewish and Ukrainian soldiers, finally drew the line at such incredible and untenable alliances. His Turkish overlords, he said, would fear the prospect of the Hussars of Israel focusing their emancipatory energies on the Ottoman province of Palestine. Angrily disappointed, Mickiewicz retreated to his Istanbul home. He was still strategizing futilely about the Hussars of Israel when a few weeks later, in November 1855, he suddenly died of cholera.
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Poland, the country effaced from the map of Europe with the help of Enlightenment philosophes, remained a dream until the end of the First World War. But Mickiewicz left a lasting legacy in the form of a nationalist cult of sacrifice and martyrdom, a vogue of ceremonies and ritual, and an aesthetic longing, articulated by several writers after him, for action and danger.
Writing of the literary influences over the French Revolution, Tocqueville marvelled at ‘the most unusual historical situation – in which the entire political education of a great nation was carried out by men of letters’:
Under their lengthy discipline, in the absence of other leaders, and given the profound ignorance of practice from which all suffered, the nation read their works and acquired the instincts, the cast of mind, the tastes, and even the peculiarities of those who wrote. So that when the nation finally had to act, it carried over into politics all the habits of literature.
This was also true for stateless and nation-free writers like Mickiewicz, who suffered from a ‘profound ignorance of practice’. They flourished at a time when literary exiles created peoples and nations in an atmosphere of heady freedom – in flagrant disregard of geographical facts and territorial boundaries – and entrusted them with holy missions.
Herder’s historicism had posited a world culture developing from lower to higher stages, with the torch of progress passed on from one country to another. It enabled the bookish latecomers to modern history to promise their imagined ‘people’ a ‘tryst with destiny’: a phrase Jawaharlal Nehru used on the eve of India’s independence in 1947, and which could have been deployed by anyone in the preceding century – from the Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni, Hungarian poet-nationalists Sándor Pet?fi and Ferenc K?lcsey, the Russian anti-Western writers Konstantin Sergeyevich Aksakov and Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev to the Zionist novelists and poets Theodor Herzl and Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
Mickiewicz went much further than all the poet-prophets in believing that Poland, crucified by Frederick and Catherine, was nothing less than the ‘Christ’ of nations, which ‘will rise from the dead and will liberate all the peoples of Europe from slavery’. (It was this identification of nation with God that attracted the Catholic Lamennais to the Polish writer in Paris.) The messianic fervour he brought to his quest for a nation lived through his many disciples. It manifests itself today among settler-Zionists, whose secular hero Jabotinsky proclaimed that nationalism was the holy Torah, as much as it does among the Hussars of Hinduism.
Failing Better at Supremacism
Mickiewicz was rarely parted from his copy of the Bible; and he was vulnerable to the cult of Napoleon and such charlatans as Andrzej Towian?ski, who claimed that the Slavs, the Jews and the French had appointed roles to play in the coming Apocalypse. But there was nothing uniquely Polish or even Christian about Mickiewicz’s overt religiosity of nationalist sentiment, the belief in resurrection and salvation. All those who felt left behind by the Atlantic West’s economic and political progress could imagine themselves to be the chosen people.
Failure made the messianic fantasy of redemption and glory grow particularly fast. Such was the case in Italy, where notions of cultural exceptionalism – built on myths of ancient Rome’s unique and universal significance, and played up by a series of poet-prophets – made even national self-determination seem a mean achievement to the self-chosen people. Few countries were as poorly equipped for nationhood as this overwhelmingly peasant, illiterate and linguistically diverse country. Since the Renaissance, Italy had been divided into city states that were continually threatened by invasion and occupation from neighbouring powers. Marx compared it to India, arguing for:
the same dismemberment in the political configuration. Just as Italy has, from time to time, been compressed by the conqueror’s sword into different national masses, so do we find Hindustan, when now under the pressure of the Mohammedan, or the Mogul, or the Briton, dissolved into as many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns, or even villages.
Risorgimento (literally, ‘resurrection’), the movement for the political unification of Italy, began after the French Revolution, and lurched in the following eighty years through three wars of independence and several diplomatic and military battles. But for many young Italians the political and social work required to overcome Italy’s fragmentation and achieve unity always seemed paltry compared to the new spiritual community that could be built for universal purification and revival.