Читать книгу The History of Yugoslavia - Henry Baerlein - Страница 89

Rakovski was born at the picturesque little town of Kotel in the eastern Balkans, and was educated at Constantinople, but his ebullient temperament did not allow him to pursue his studies to the end. He turned up at Braila in 1841 and, being hardly twenty years of age, was dreaming of a revolution of the Orient. With a group of insurgents he tried to cross the Danube and to rouse the Bulgars. A Roumanian patrol opens fire, on each side there are several killed and wounded. He is captured and condemned to death, but having a Greek passport he is rescued by the Greek Consul and put on board a boat which lands him at Marseilles. For eighteen months he lives in France—it is not known where—and is imbued with democratic doctrine. Passing through Constantinople in 1843 he accepts a post as schoolmaster at Trnovo, but is immediately at loggerheads with the Greek bishop and departs. Returning to his birthplace he is irritated by the pride and harshness of the upper class, and he attempts to make the people rise against them. They charge him with being a disturber of the peace. "He has travelled through Europe," says their complaint to the Government, "and now in this town he bestrides a horse, brandishes his sword and overwhelms the Turks with insults, both their race and their religion." In consequence Rakovski and his father are arrested and dispatched to Constantinople, where they both of them remain in prison until 1847. After being liberated, he forms a secret society which is to take advantage of the approaching Russo-Turkish conflict. Its members are to have themselves enrolled among the Turks, with the double object of protecting the Bulgarian population from excesses on the part of the soldiery and also, at the propitious moment, to stir them up and so assist the Russians. He himself is appointed to the Turkish staff at Shumen, as first dragoman. His plot being discovered, he is arrested and sent to Constantinople; on the way he escapes, but he proceeds to Constantinople and organizes there a company of heiduks. Turkey's entrance into the European concert fills him with pessimism. The Bulgars at Constantinople believe that the civilizing influence of the West will not be in vain. He foresees a more evil despotism masked by the pseudo-liberal manœuvres of the Powers, and henceforward he joins those Bulgars who agitate from Roumania or from Serbia. He goes to the Banat, where he is not only made most welcome but is enabled to publish The Bulgarian News, which is political, and a literary supplement, The Swan of the Danube. The Turks are uneasy; they ask the Austrians to suppress these papers. The Austrians comply and expel the editor. He is persecuted by the Porte in Moldavia and flies to Russia, where he devotes himself seriously to a long poem in honour of the heiduks. The first part of this very long work, the Gorski Patnik, had appeared at Novi Sad. It brought him considerable fame—he was compared with Virgil—but modern readers find this poem tedious. He likewise wrote a dissertation which established, by comparative philology, that the Bulgars are the most direct descendants of the Aryans, that their language is the nearest to Sanskrit, and that the other European languages, including Greek and Latin, are derived from it. Rakovski next appears in Belgrade, where he leads a life of splendour; he had carriages and wonderful horses, he was arrayed in a princely kind of uniform and was surrounded by a kind of guard. The source of his revenues, which always seemed to fluctuate, was never fathomed; but they may at this period have accrued from his literary labours, which—although the present generation smile—produced among the Bulgars a vast, patriotic pride. At Belgrade the visionary historian and whimsical philologist becomes a most sagacious politician. He is the first Bulgarian publicist to talk of a free press, and he refuses, unlike many others, to seek help from Russia only. "We must help ourselves," he cries. "As we are Orthodox, Russia will desire to keep us under the authority of the Greek Church; as we are Slavs, she will try to make the Western Powers suspicious of us." When there was a wave of emigration to Russia he frantically tried to stop it. "For you it will be suicide," he exclaimed, "for your children assassination and for Bulgaria ruin!" He painted Russia in appalling colours, and the would-be emigrants repented. His personal affairs oppressed him for a time in 1862, when he left Belgrade to the imprecations of his creditors. The Serbian statesmen, while appreciating his exalted patriotism, would have sooner had amongst them a more typical and stable Bulgar. Yet they declined the Porte's request for extradition. At the beginning of 1863 Rakovski is in Athens, magnificent once more and now accompanied by an aide-de-camp, a Montenegrin captain, whom he introduces as related to Nikita. He is forming an alliance of the Balkan States, which, according to his calculations, will exterminate the Turk in Europe. He promises himself to furnish 20,000 volunteers—to start with. In the previous year when he had planned to liberate Bulgaria with 12,000 volunteers, of whom a hundred were to be cavalry and another hundred gunners, he could gather only 500. And now again he is disillusioned and leaves Athens.

It was during his stay there that he met the well-known Balkan travellers, Miss Irby and Miss Muir Mackenzie. They had been up and down the Peninsula in 1862 and 1863, making very exhaustive inquiries that were the basis of their book.[48] In 1917 Professor Ivan Shishmanoff discovered two letters of Miss Muir Mackenzie's in Sofia and published them in Sbornik. The first is dated May 12, and is in German. "Since we have been here we have made the acquaintance of Mr. Rakovski," she writes. "He has been so kind as to teach me Serbian, during Miss Irby's illness. We like him very much, and I know of no one among the Slavs with whose opinion we so entirely agree; because he does not think as a Serbian or yet a Montenegrin or a Croat or a Bulgar, but as a Slav. … I can't tell you how much I fear that their internal divisions will make impossible the realization of a Yugoslav country. One can't hope for much from the Greeks; they have exorbitant ambitions and neither private nor public integrity. Those are bad faults to find in an ally. And they speak openly of a Byzantine Empire! And reckon that all the Southern Slavs, Serbs as well as Bulgars, belong to them. … I hope that England will some day assure herself that there are other Christians in the East besides the Greeks."