Representations of Serbia and the Serbs in the 18Th and 19Th Century British Imagination

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Japanese Slavic and East European Studies Vol.38. 2017

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Frontiers of Serbia: Representations of Serbia and the Serbs in the 18th and 19th Century British Imagination

Cy Mathews (Chuo University Faculty of Policy Studies)

English-speaking regions have long held a negative view of the Slavic world. Katarina Luketić has described how, “in Western collective representations, the Balkans are often considered to be the refuse, a menagerie of Europe, it’s dark and out-of-the-way part. … it’s wild edge, Europe’s appendix” (translated and quoted by Ljiljana Šarić, 54), while the term balkanization was coined to describe, as the U.S. newspaper correspondent Paul Scott Mowrer put it in 1921, “a region of hopelessly mixed races … more or less backward populations, economically and financially weak, covetous, intriguing, afraid, a continual prey to the machinations of the great powers, and to the violent promptings of their own passions” (quoted in Živančević-Sekeruš, 105–106). In this paper, I will examine the development of such ideas, focusing specifically on early Eng- lish-language representations of Serbia and the Serbs. I will examine both posi tive and negative representations in Romantic-era English literature, beginning with the broader popularity of translated Slavic folk poetry in the early 1800s and moving on to consider how Serbia was shown in travelogues and a variety of fictional genre. These depictions are prime examples of “that struggle over geography” that Edward Said writes of as taking place in the realm of “ideas … forms … images and imaginings” (7): the realm in which culturally-dominant outsiders shape the national and ethnic identities of others. While the term balkanization dates from the early 20th century, these nega tive “images and imaginings” are deeply rooted in earlier British interactions with the Balkan region. Their origins can be traced to the Romantic era — that

66 Frontiers of Servia: Representations of Serbia and the Serbs in the 18th and 19th Century… period that encompasses the last decades of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th. During this period the increasing popularity of both fictional narra- tives and non-fiction travelogues expanded British horizons to encompass parts of the world that had previously had little impact on the English-reading public. In such writings, Serbia was represented as an unstable and dangerous zone caught between different worlds: between civilization and savagery, between the primitive past and the modernizing present. And yet — perhaps unexpectedly considering the negative tone of most of these representations — there was also a positive aspect to the overall depiction of Serbia. In many ways Serbia — with its origins lost in prehistory, its Ottoman occupied present, and its uncertain future — became a space upon which outsiders projected their own fantasies of cultural transformation: the belief that out of the deprivations of the present a noble and vibrant future could arise. What Vesna Goldsworthy describes as the “British ‘narrative colonisation’ of the Balkans” (xxvi) was not to begin until the nineteenth century, and even then, Serbia was overshadowed by Greece and Albania, regions described in detail in Lord Byron’s poetry and letters. We can, however, find significant representations of Serbia throughout the entire Romantic era. Throughout this era Serbia was effectively isolated from the rest of western European cultural life. The Ottoman occupation of the Balkans had, since 1482, cast that entire region into an ambiguous position: neither Orient nor Occident but rather what would become known as “the Orient of Europe,” a liminal zone partaking of elements of both East and West yet belonging to neither (Wolff, 6). The region became a blank space for the Western European imagination to fill. For English-language writers in the Romantic era, Serbia was both a savage remnant of European barbarism and a border zone “occupying a position at the interstices between worlds, histories and continents” (Fleming, 1232); it was presented as a battle- ground, a stage on which the struggles of empires and cultures, entities often foreign to Serbia itself, were played out. In 1774 the idea of Serbia as a remnant of a traditional, folkloric past became popular across Europe. In this year Alberto Fortis, a Venetian traveller and car- tographer, published a travelogue titled A Voyage into Dalmatia (Viaggio in Dal- mazia) which included a Serbian epic poem, the “Hasanaginica”, reproduced in both its original Serbo-Croat and in Italian translation. The poem — a tragic narrative of a nobleman’s death in battle and his wife’s subsequent disgrace —

67 Cy Mathews caught the attention of many prominent literary figures throughout Europe, including Goethe, who published his own version in 1777. This version made its way to Great Britain, where, sometime between 1794 and 1799, Sir Walter Scott reworked it into English as “Lamentation of the Faithful Wife of Asan Aga” (Goldsworthy, 27). From 1814 onwards more Serbian folk poetry began to flow into Europe, due mainly to the efforts of the pioneering Serb philologist and patron of folklore, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. Karadžić, as part of his life-long project to preserve and promote Serbian language and culture, published several collections of Serbian folk poetry which were seen, outside Serbia, as providing not only a valuable link with the past but also a bridge between Europe and the Orient. It was within this context that in Britain in 1821 Karol Szyrma, a natural- ized Pole, published a translated folk poem titled “Zaboy, Slawoy, and Ludrek: A Sclavonian Tale.” The poem, and an accompanying essay, was published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. The poem itself is a violently patriotic story of Serb resistance against, and vengeance upon, foreign invaders, telling how “everywhere they killed and crushed [the enemy] beneath their horses’ hoof … . the armies bring desolation through the villages [of the enemy]” (151). Szyrma clearly attempts to enlist his readers sympathy for the Serbs by drawing comparisons between Serbian folk poetry and the poetry of the Scots, claiming that the Serbians needed only a James MacPherson or a Walter Scott “to recal [sic] from beneath the mountain tombs … overgrown with moss and weeds, the bold spirit of the old Sclavonian [Slav] chivalry” (148). MacPherson and Scott were both figures seen as instrumental in the revival of Scottish folk culture; MacPherson is especially significant in that he had been responsible, in 1760, for “discovering” and translating the work of an ancient Gaelic epic poet known as Ossian. Ossian was later found to be MacPherson’s own invention, yet the international acclaim it received (Goethe, again, praised the work) did much to raise Scottish culture in international esteem. While Serbia may have fallen, long ago, to the Ottomans, Szyrma clearly saw the potential for international recognition of its rich folk heritage to lead to a cultural renaissance. Szyrma may well have felt he had found his MacPherson in the form of John Bowring, secretary of the London Greek Committee and the compiler of a suc- cessful collection of Russian poems in English, Specimens of the Russian Poets (1823). In 1827 Bowring published Servian Popular Poetry to widespread acclaim, much of which praised Bowring as a translator and benevolent cultural

68 Frontiers of Servia: Representations of Serbia and the Serbs in the 18th and 19th Century… ambassador for the region. Bowring himself promoted this image, claiming that his chief desire was to bring “fresh olive branches of peace and fresh garlands of poetry” to the English reading world, and writing a dedication to Karadžić in which he described the Serb’s simple house “of clay” from which his poetic “effluence” was as “sunshine” (Coleman 444). Bowring was seen as reaching out from civilized modern-day Britain to the far reaches of the Eastern past, preserving and bringing into the light their ancient and primitive songs — songs that were, according to an anonymous reviewer in The Times of 1827, the pro duct of “an age of darkness, and a half-savage race,” full of vitality yet “rude or childish” relics from an era the West of Europe had long left behind (3). The review shows the complex reaction of a British reader to such texts: the reader is simultaneously repulsed by the “half-savage” nature of the culture, and attracted by the raw energies intrinsic to such so-called primitiveness. While this primal Serbian past as narrated through folk songs may have caught the imagination of the West, Serbia’s present was viewed in more negative ways. In 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu passed through Serbia on her way to join her husband in Constantinople. Lady Mary, the wife of the British Ambassador to Istanbul, was the first English woman to write about these regions, and her richly detailed letters home would, when published posthumously, generate intense interest not only in the “Orient,” but in those Slavic regions that bordered it. While her journey took place well before the start of the Ro- mantic era, sections of her letters concerning Serbia were published in popular anthologies throughout the late 18th century. In one piece Lady Mary describes the Serbian countryside as a wild place of “desert woods … the common refuge of thieves who rob, fifty in a company.” Travellers could only pass safely with armed guards, and those locals not actively engaged in robbery were reluctant to offer hospitality, being “so poor, that only force could extract from them the necessary provisions.” She describes Ottoman rule as being extremely oppres- sive: the Turks, so she claims, first strip the countryside of resources, then level a “teeth money” tax: a tax, that is, to compensate for the work done by Turkish teeth when eating Serbian produced food (98). What is particularly striking in these descriptions is how, while she draws attention to the brutality of the Ot- tomans, her own relationship to the Serbs is also that of an oppressor. The locals may prowl the forests in search of travellers to rob, yet those same travellers force the locals to give them food, drink, and shelter. Serbia is presented here

69 Cy Mathews as a zone of violence in which the outsider is obligated to take the active role, not of victim, but of aggressor. Toward the end of the Romantic era, in 1844, we find another description of Serbia, one strikingly similar to that Lady Mary makes in her early 18th century account. In his Eothen, the immensely popular travel writer Alexander Kingslake tells how he passed through “endless and endless” stretches of oak forest, trees as “grim as an army of giants with a thousand years of pay in ar- rear.” Traveling through the forest at night, a “pale and mystic” moon causes his Tartar guide to “look out for demons, and take proper means for keeping them off,” proper means being to give out loud “shrieks and dismal howls” (14). Lady Mary’s advice seems to still hold true: arriving at a hamlet they find the Serb locals “careful to conceal their riches, as well as their wives,” and reluctant to provide them with food until Kingslake’s guides threaten them with violence. Thereupon “the land soon flowed with milk, and mountains of eggs arose,” and Kingslake and his party dine in comfort, the “duty of candlesticks… ably performed by a couple of intelligent natives: the rest of the villages stood by the open doorway at the lower end of the room,” solemnly gazing in at the visitors from the alien world of the present (15). Again, the outsiders occupy a position of power that seems more threatening (from a Serbian perspective) than the primaeval forests through which Kingslake and his part make their way. There is, however, a further contradiction in these descriptions. For all the harshness of the Ottoman regime and the power of the travellers, Lady Mary describes the Serb population as almost ungovernable due to their fierce passions and lawlessness. On the one hand, she writes that the Serbs are abject: “a minister of state is not spoken to, but on the knee; should a reflection on his conduct be dropped in a coffee house (for they have spies everywhere) the house would be raised to the ground, and perhaps the entire company put to the torture.” On the other hand, she describes how “when a minister here displeases the people, in three hours’ time he is dragged from his master’s arms; they cut off his head, hands, and feet, and throw them before the palace gate … while the sultan (to whom all profess an unlimited affection) sits trembling in his apartments” (105). Early nineteenth century British travellers found a country a little less violent than that Lady Mary describes, but one just as poor and abject. In 1834 Irish journalist Michael Quin observed peasant houses “built of wood or of bricks … wretched habitations, many of them worse than the cabins of Ireland.” Even the

70 Frontiers of Servia: Representations of Serbia and the Serbs in the 18th and 19th Century… castles “seemed to be the habitation of a numerous tribe of birds” (Pavlowich 323–325). Travel writer Edmund Spenser, in 1836, seems to confirm Quin’s account, stating that the “huts” he observed only appeared “fit for quadrupeds to inhabit” (325). Such observations are repeated by other, non-British sources: in 1837, the Russian Count Anatoly Demidov (his name transliterated at the time as “Demidoff”) would observe similarly dilapidated villages abandoned by peasants fearing the plague (101). Quin, Spenser, and Demidov all passed through Serbia by way of boat down the Danube, a mode of transportation that effectively detached them from the landscape they moved through; Serbia became a shoreline drifting past the traveller’s eyes, their boats effecting a physical separation that compounded cultural and linguistic differences. Closer interac- tion was complicated by the fact that the shoreline was for the most part under Ottoman control (Austria controlled the northern bank between Belgrade and Semendria). Travellers setting foot on Ottoman ground were subject to a ten- day quarantine. The Austrian authorities permitted visits to Ottoman-controlled Belgrade on request, but only during daylight and only with an accompaniment of quarantine and customs officers. This escort, armed with staves, effectively prevented any direct contact with locals, ostensibly to guard against the spread of infectious diseases. Francis Hervé, a French-born British painter and travel writer, was unusual in this period for travelling not by water along the Danube but overland. Setting out from Constantinople in 1836, Hervé saw Serbia as a stepping stone from the Orient back to his native West. As such, it was an area in which elements of each culture mixed and mingled. Writing of Belgrade, Hervé describes how the town appeared “foreign looking” and “picturesque” but also “something more handsome and European than any other town we had passed through.” The streets contained an “immense variety” of different costumes, many of them “very amusing,” and there “appeared to be a great partiality for fur,” suggesting the wild and exotic regions of the East. Yet here Hervé also “first began to see coats and waistcoats,” signs of the West and civilization. However, as Hervé goes on to add, “the persons wearing them, generally having mustachios, had a completely foreign appearance.” Through such hybridity, Serbia became for the homeward-bound Hervé “the last monument” that he would “perhaps ever behold of Eastern climes.” It was a region “of romance, where civilisation and customs still remind us of the most interesting periods, where the wild, the sub-

71 Cy Mathews lime, and the picturesque, are alternately presenting their charms, where pomp and grandeur are profusely displayed, and where the rude bursts of nature have never felt man’s spoiling hand” (314–316). Here, again, we encounter Serbia as a region existing not just as a state of transition between Europe and the Orient, but a strange zone of alternative realities where past and present, high and low, and even nature and civilization are in perpetual flux. C. B. Elliott, an English clergyman and civil servant who travelled down the Danube in 1838, gives us a glimpse of a different Serbia, one extending not only into the past but also into a possible future. Though much of Elliott’s narrative is occupied with the same scenes of poverty, primitiveness, and exoticism as cited above—in his introduction, he feels obliged to apologize for having to describe “the habits and manners of nations among whom morality is little estimated and purity of thought completely unknown” (v) — he also touches upon the new spirit of liberalism alive in Serbia. Prince Miloš was in the process of “conferring upon his people the benefits of a constitution” based upon the Napoleonic Code, which Elliott saw as ushering in a bright new future for the Serb people. Elliott put this new hope in perspective by contrasting it with the perceived ignobility of Serbia’s past, the past of “Servi and Slavi, men whose names are identical with servility and slavery in every language of Europe” (52–53). These words echo the statements made by Szyma in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1821, where he writes of Slavic “dismay … servility … mental incapacity and darkness,” (146) shot through with the potential to “re-assume their national character in all its purity, and by its salutary influence, rise in mild- ness and strength to the splendour of moral dignity and greatness” (149). In the eyes of outsiders, it seems that the hope for the future is intrinsically tied up with a sense of the historical abasement of the Slav peoples, a race so used to servitude it was manifest in their very name. Fictional and fictionalized representations of the region combine the idealiza- tion of Serbia with these more negative views. The Siege of Belgrade, an anonymous four-volume novel supposedly translated from German by an anonymous translator in 1791, deals with the adventures of a Polish Count named Albert Zaimoiski. The first two volumes of the novel are set in Russia in the 1780s and narrate Zaimoiski’s narrow escape from the licentious attentions of Catherine the Great and his falling in love with a beautiful orphan, Veda, whom he manages to save from an arranged marriage to a brutish Russian, Prince Czerskakov.

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Volumes 3 and 4 shift the action to Serbia, where Zaimoiski goes to fight, joining the Austrian forces to assist at the 1789 siege of Belgrade. A vengeful Czer- skakov conspires to have Veda kidnapped by the Turks, whereupon the battle for Belgrade seems to become more about rescuing her than any political end. For the most part, Serbia itself serves only as a backdrop for the conflict of the novel’s non-Serbian protagonist. Escaping from her Turkish captors, however, Veda passes through the sort of wild Serbian landscape already familiar to us. In a thickly wooded forest, she is oppressed by “the awful silence of the night; the deeply umbrageous gloom of the forest; the apprehension of wild beasts” and, especially, “the terror of more wild and savage man” (49). She finds sanctuary in a cave that turns out to be a primitive Christian chapel, its floor “covered with a carpet of dyed teeth and small bones of animals” (52). Veda is taken in by the owner of the cave, the hermit Polidorus, who is quick to dif- ferentiate himself from the local Serbs: he is “as alien in this distracted country, where mortals, madly disturbing their own repose, made their lives wretched for the power of giving others misery” (55). Actual Serbian protagonists are conspic- uous in their absence from the novel: where they do appear, they are large groups of peasants rather than individuals, such as the “body of Servians” who entreat the Austrians “to be considered as subjects and soldiers of the German Emperor” (61). The Serb people are portrayed as welcoming their Russian and Austrian invaders, domination by Christian outsiders seen as preferable to domination by the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The novel presents the Serb people as simple and powerless on their own, only capable of rising against the Ottomans when roused by heroic outsiders such as the Austrians and the Russians. Going by almost the same title as the novel is James Cobb’s The Siege of Bel- grade: a Comic Opera, in Three Acts, also published in 1791. Like the novel, the play uses the Russo-Turkish war as a setting for love and adventure. The main plotline is similar to that of the novel; Katherine, the wife of an Austrian Colonel Cohenburg, has been kidnapped by the Ottoman Seraskier, who has imprisoned her in a (one-woman) harem housed in a desecrated convent. Meanwhile, a Serb peasant girl named Lilla is in love with a Serb peasant boy named Leopold, but is barred from seeing him because of his being “too passionate to make a good husband.” Betrothed to a Turkish justice of the peace, the miser Yusef, Lilla runs off to beg help from Seraskier, who instead decides to add her to his harem. Like the novel, the play emphasizes the raw, simple nature of the Serbs, Seraskier describing Lilla as “a pleasing sample of rustic simplicity” (5) while

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Leopold finds it comically difficult to curb his violent impulses, half-choking Lilla’s brother Peter, attacking Yusef, and breaking down several locked doors. Again, despite the presence of these significant Serbian characters, the main action of the play revolves around the non-Serbian protagonists. In the climac- tic battle, for example, the stage directions describe “a party of Turks” being “repuls’d by a party of Austrians,” and an “Austrian Soldier” fighting “sword in hand with a Turkish Soldier” (46). As in the similarly-named novel, conquest by the Austrians is presented as a positive thing, the play ending with a chorus of Austrian soldiers singing a song to “freedom” (47). In 1791 the Austrians returned Belgrade to the Ottomans. In 1804, the Serbs rose up in the First Serbian Revolt, which had short-lived success until eventually being defeated in 1813. One of the leaders of the revolution, George Petrovich, also known as Karageorgie or “Black George,” attracted a degree of attention in Britain as a tragic hero, the Reverend George Croly writing a poem, “Czemi George,” published in 1830. Croly, a somewhat bombastic poet specializing in historical figures and battles, wrote a short prose introduction to the poem that details the events of Petrovich’s life and death, suggesting these facts may not have been readily known to the British public. Croly describes Petrovich as being “descended from a family of Servian nobles” — in reality, he was born a peasant — yet also claims that he belongs to a class of “bold creations of wild countries and troubled times; beings of impetuous courage, iron strength, original talent, and doubtful morality.” Croly goes on to state that “Civilization levels and subdues the inequalities of the general mind: barbarism shows, with the desolation, the grandeur of the wilderness, — the dwarfed and the gigantic side by side, a thousand diminished and decaying productions overshadowed by one mighty effort of savage fertility” (166). Significantly, Petrovich is described as having “sunken eyes” and a “bald forehead, bound with a single black tress of hair” giving him a look “rather Asiatic than European”: the ambiguity of his nation is embodied in his physical presence. Croly represents Petrovich as almost a kind of primal and elemental figure, stating that it “was his custom to sit in silence for hours together: he could neither read nor write, but he was a great warrior” (169). Petrovich is a figure from another age, a dark past of brutal forces and primal energies. The poem itself describes Petrovich’s 1817 execution in highly dramatic terms, which Goldsworthy claims seek to compensate for a “lack of specific detail with a great deal of blood and heavy symbolism” (29). Croly describes

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Petrovich as “No Moslem … his brow is bare, / save one wild tress of raven hair, / like a black serpent deeply bound” (172). Petrovich’s difference from his Ottoman executioners is emphasized, yet he is also differentiated from civilized Europe, with his wild, snake-like hair placing him more in the realm of animal nature than the sphere of the human. The fact that the hair-serpent is “deeply bound,” wild yet captive, can be extended to refer not only to Petrovich’s own state of bondage, but to that of the entire Serbian people. Significantly, Croly fails to mention that Petrovich was put to death as much at the instigation of Prince Miloš (whose authority he threatened) as the Ottomans. Here Croly breaks with the tradition of emphasizing the supposed hybridity of the Serbs, preferring to place them in the European camp, diametrically opposed to their Oriental oppressors. The somewhat more complex political reality of semi-au- tonomous Ottoman occupied Serbia is ignored in preference for a straightfor- ward dichotomy, summed up in the image of the proud, defiant Serb executed by an exotic oppressor. Combined, these representations draw together to provide us with an idea of Serbia not so much as a nation-state but rather as a state of transition between other, more stable modes of being. On one level, it was a place to be physically passed through on the way from Europe into the “real” Orient. Yet on a deeper level, it was a place where the primal past of heroism and savagery flowed through into the modern civilized world. As occupants of such a liminal zone, the Serb people themselves were presented as being lost in the flux. The desti- nies of alien empires and lovers may have been resolved on its ground, but they themselves were remnants from a legacy of violence, folk-songs, and oppression, figures pushed into the background by the tides of history. Pavle Sekeruš has described how, in the 21st century, the Serbs “are no longer romantically exoticized, but branded as uncivilized, violent barbarians” (237). As we have seen, Serbia has long been depicted as uncivilized and violent. What seems to have dropped out of more recent representations, however, is the accompanying sense of potential positive transformation. Ultimately, this may be more the result of a broader shift in the West’s perception of itself than any reflection on Serbia and the Serbs: without an optimistic future to move towards, the unstable energies of change cease to have positive connotations. Yet in the 18th and 19th century British imagination, the Serb culture was seen as harbor- ing the seeds of a modern, self-determining future, their darker elements shot through with a bright vein of optimism.

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