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

Japanese Slavic and East European Studies Vol.38. 2017 ARTICLES 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 de- scribe, 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 positive 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 negative “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 de- tail 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).

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