Michał Czajkowski

Portrait of Michał Czajkowski by Antoni Oleszczyński

Michał Czajkowski ( Ukrainian Мі́хал Чайко́вський Michal Tschaikowskyj or Turkish (Mehmet) Sadık Paşa ; born September 19, 1804 in Halchyn near Berdychiv in Volhynia , Ukraine , at that time Russia ; † January 18, 1886 in Borky , Ukraine) was a special Polish writer Penchant for Cossack issues and political dissident who worked for both the Polish underground and the resurrection of a Cossack- dominated Ukraine.

youth

Czajkowski, a descendant of the Ukrainian-Cossack hetman Iwan Brjuchowezki , who ruled between 1663 and 1668, was born in the Polish-Catholic environment of western Ukraine. As a young man he took part in the Polish November uprising of 1830/1831 and after the failure of the same he sought exile in France . There he began to devote himself to Cossack national issues and gave birth to the idea of ​​the resurrection of an independent Cossack nation. Czajkowski created numerous idealizing novels with Cossack content at this time, which at times enjoyed great popularity. Some of them have even been translated into German. At that time he saw no contradiction in Polish or Cossack interests and idealized the common Ukrainian-Polish past.

France and Ottoman Empire

During his time in France, Czajkowski cultivated conspiratorial contacts with the radical Polish Democratic Society for a short time, later with the more moderate Federation of the Polish People, before joining the conservative group of emigrants led by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski , which was called " Hôtel Lambert " the residence and habitual abode of the Prince. At Czartoryski's request, Czajkowski traveled up to the then Turkish-occupied Balkans to coordinate anti-Russian activities in Bosnia and Serbia, and later also in the Caucasus. In the years that followed the unsuccessful revolution of 1848, Czajkowski repeatedly sought political asylum for persecuted Hungarian and Polish revolutionaries in Western European countries. The efforts of Russia and Austria to extradite him and differences of opinion with Paris led him to convert to Islam - from then on he was called "Mehmet Sadık Paşa". Under Turkish sovereignty he organized a Cossack brigade to fight against Russia. Although his brigade was active in a few small skirmishes in the Balkans during the Crimean War , the group did not succeed in marching into Ukraine as originally planned.

Return to Ukraine

Although Czajkowski returned from the Crimean War as a highly decorated soldier and had the prospect of a carefree life in the lap of the Sublime Porte, his restless nature could not rest. His differences with the Hôtel Lambert, which had grown over the years, finally caused him to turn his back entirely on the Polish emigre movement. In addition, he was frustrated by the failure of his Cossack plans. When the Russian government promised him impunity in 1872, he returned to his home state of Russia - certainly under the influence of his third wife, a young Greek girl. There he converted to Ukrainian Orthodoxy and settled in Kiev , where he wrote his extensive memoirs. His young wife turned out to be unfaithful and a deprived of all courage to live, Czajkowski committed suicide in 1886.

meaning

Czajkowski was remembered as a great Cossack romantic, as the companion of numerous other prominent Polish romantics such as Adam Mickiewicz and as a leading exponent of the Ukrainian school of Polish literature. His writings had a not insignificant influence on the younger generations of the Polish upper class in western Ukraine. The childhood reading of his writings may also later drove prominent historians such as Volodymyr Antonovych and Vyacheslav Lypynsky into the arms of the Ukrainian national movement.

Works

• Powieści Kozackie (Cossack Tales, 1837)
• Wernyhora (1838)
• Kirdzali (1839) (Kirdschali. A story from the Donaulande. Translated by Gustav Diezel. Stuttgart, Franckh, 1843. The foreign fiction 38 - 40)
• Owruczanin (The Owrutschaner, 1841)
• Ukrainki (The Ukrainian, 1841)

swell

• Thomas M. Prymak, "The Strange Life of Sadyk Pasha," Forum: A Ukrainian Review , no. 50 (1982), 28-31.

1. ↑ Friedrich Schrader : From the Pole times of Peras. In: Constantinople Past and Present. Mohr (Siebeck), Tübingen 1917, pp. 180-184.