In the late watercolors of the Russian symbolist Maksimilian Voloshin (1877–1932), Crimea is a double-voiced muse. In radiant blues and vigorous greens, his paintings of the Black Sea peninsula celebrate a muscular natural landscape, a sea and sky bound to jagged peaks and sun-bleached shores. Yet in their paucity of human figures, in their barren trees borne from thin, tremulous brushstrokes, these akvareli also lament a troubled human landscape—one that seems afflicted by what Voloshin calls a “desiccation of human cultures” (“prosykhanie liudskikh kul'tur”) in the poem “Dom poeta” (“House of the Poet” [1926]): Zdes’, v etikh skladkakh moria i zemli,Liudskikh kul'tur ne prosykhala plesen’—Prostor stoletii byl dlia zhizni tesen,Pokamest my—Rossiia—ne prishli.Za poltorasta let—s Ekateriny –My vytoptali musul’manskii rai,Sveli lesa, razmykali ruiny,Raskhitili i razorili krai.1(Here [in Crimea], in the folds of land and sea,Mold had not desiccated the cultures of humankind—The expanse of a century was in the end too narrow,For we—Russia—had not yet arrived.For one hundred and fifty years—since Catherine—We have trampled upon this Muslim paradise,Cut down forests, desecrated ruins,Looted and plundered the land.)For Voloshin, the human victims of this plunder are the Crimean Tatars, a Sunni Muslim Turkic-speaking people whose khanate ruled Crimea and its environs for over three centuries before being incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1783. Catherine II's annexation of the peninsula prompted generations of Crimean Tatars to leave their yeşil alda (green island) for the ak toprak (white land) of the Ottoman Empire, but what had begun as a stream of emigrants in the late eighteenth century became a flood after the Crimean War (1853–1856).2 At this time, as Aleksandr Nekrich explains, “Tsarist officials [under the leadership of Aleksandr II] brought wholesale charges against the Crimean Tatars for allegedly having helped Turkey [during the Crimean War]. These charges were meant to divert attention from the inept performance of the tsarist government itself, and its bureaucrats, during the war.”3For Voloshin, who spent a part of his childhood as well as the end of his life in Koktebel’, on Crimea's southern coast, these charges were nothing less than “barbaric.”4 In his words, they forced a “hard-working and loyal” (“trudoliubivoe i loial’noe”) people into a “tragic emigration” (“tragicheskaia emigratsiia”) to Ottoman lands.5 Like Aleksandr Herzen, who in 1861 had exposed and railed against the atrocities committed against the Crimean Tatar people by Russian troops after the war in the pages of the newspaper Kolokol, Voloshin issued a scathing indictment of imperial rule of the peninsula over the course of the nineteenth century in an essay entitled “Kul'tura, iskusstvo, pamiatniki Kryma” (“The Culture, Art, and Monuments of Crimea” [1924]).6 “One hundred and fifty years of crude imperial rule over Crimea,” he writes, “has pulled the ground out from underneath the feet [of the Crimean Tatars] [vyrvalo u nikh pochvu iz-pod nog].”7 It also pulled the wool over the eyes of Russian artists, turning them from perceptive observers into myopic “tourists”: The relationship of Russian artists to Crimea has been the relationship of tourists surveying notable places with a painterly eye [zhivopisnost’iu]. This perspective [ton] was given to us by Pushkin, and after him, poets and painters over the course of the entire century have seen Crimea only as “O enchanting land! O delight of the eyes!” [“Volshebnyi krai! ochei otrada!”]. And nothing more. Such were all the Russian poems and paintings composed throughout the nineteenth century. They all worship the beauty of the southern shores with poems abounding in exclamation marks.8Embedded in this critique is a normative understanding of home in the “second Crimea”—what I define, for the purposes of this article, as the Crimea “made of” literary works from the Russian and Turkish traditions.9 For Voloshin, there is an isomorphic, one-to-one correspondence between Crimean territorial form—what I call “place”—and Tatar cultural content—what I call “personality”—that was shaken over the course of the nineteenth century. This correspondence is a propositional calculus, as it were, stating “Crimea is Tatar” and bonding Crimea to Tatars and Tatars to Crimea in equal measure. Voloshin places blame for the breakdown of this correspondence not only on imperial authorities, whose policies impelled the Crimean Tatars to leave their homeland, but also on Russian cultural figures, whose texts aided and abetted this “tragic emigration” by elevating Crimean “place” at the expense of Tatar “personality.”I use the contested term “place” in the sense employed by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, as space endowed with affect and cast as a “center of felt value.”10 The equally fraught “personality”—whose Russian equivalent lichnost’, for one, has a vast array of connotations, positive (e.g., svetlaia lichnost’), negative (kul't lichnosti), and otherwise (ustanovit’ lichnost’)—denotes here cultural coloring perceived to fix to a space, imbuing it with “felt value,” and typically viewed through the representation of an individual person.11 Personality, to be precise, is neither culture nor identity, two concepts subjected to “terminological chaos”; it does not mean, for instance, a semiotic system in the Geertzian sense or an ambiguous and fluid concept of individual or collective “selfhood” to which, as Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper argue, the social sciences and humanities have “surrendered.”12 Personality instead aligns with place to subtend a visitor's appreciation of the other's home. It is the photo in the picture frame or the color of paint on the walls or the arrangement of furniture in a room that attests to a particular human presence in space. For Voloshin, Crimea is the home of the Tatars. Visitors have entered this home, praising its “place” while ignoring, and thereby evacuating, its Tatar “personality.” He views this sanctioned blindness—or, as the case may be, deliberate evacuation—as a cultural facilitator of the politics of colonization, the brutal process of seizing a place and substituting the other's personality with one's own.This article explores Voloshin's insight in greater depth, offering close readings of two seminal Russian poems that dwell on the correspondence between Crimean place and Tatar personality before the Crimean War. It then widens the geographical, cultural, and chronological aperture of the study, looking beyond the Russian context and across the Black Sea to the Ottoman Empire after the mass emigration caused by the war. In effect, I follow not the Crimean Tatar emigrants themselves but their literary representations as they travel from one shore of the Black Sea to the other. What I seek to demonstrate is that both Russian and Turkish literatures assert this isomorphic correspondence between Crimean place and Tatar personality—claiming Crimea as the home of the Tatars—only to navigate distinct lines of flight away from it at varying points over the course of the “long nineteenth century,” each contributing in different ways to a “de-Tatarization” of the Black Sea peninsula. In Russian literature, Semen Bobrov establishes this correspondence in his epic Tavrida (1798), whereas Aleksandr Pushkin—as Voloshin claims—disturbs it in Bakhchisaraiskii fontan (The Fountain of Bakhchisarai [1824]), initiating an elevation of place over personality that will be largely perpetuated by his successors. This progressive evacuation of Tatar personality is so successful that two of the most prominent Russian works set in Crimea in the mid-to late nineteenth century, Lev Tolstoi's Sevastopol'skie rasskazy (Sevastopol Sketches [1855]) and Anton Chekhov's “Dama s sobachkoi” (“The Lady with the Lapdog” [1899]), make virtually no mention of Crimean Tatars at all. In Turkish literature, Namik Kemal testifies to this isomorphic correspondence in the novel Cezmi (1880) before staging an elevation of personality over place that will be taken in novel directions by Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) and Mehmet Emin Yurdakul (1869–1944).What unites these writers despite their differences is an interest in the position of the Crimean Tatar in the world—an other conceived as alien, in the Russian case, and an other conceived as ally, in the Turkish one—as well as an often unspoken turn toward the Black Sea. This article accordingly conceives of the Black Sea as an Ansatz—or a unifying, centripetal presence rather than a divisive, centrifugal one—in response to a prevailing academic tendency that, as Charles King notes, situates its shores in several different regional specializations but at the center of none of them.13 It does not pretend to be exhaustive in its scope or analysis, nor does it wish to impose reductive typologies on two different literary traditions awash in a turbulent time. In the Black Sea region in particular, the long nineteenth century was a period of protean and often confused nation-building projects, restive identity shopping, and growing political contestation. Navigating this terrain makes for a bumpy ride, so this sustained orientation on representations of Crimea and the Crimean Tatars is meant to steady the journey.Upon its annexation by Catherine II in 1783, Crimea was primarily displayed to visitors from Western Europe as well as St. Petersburg as the romantic land of the Tatars. Although Catherine also sought to highlight Crimea's classical inheritance, renaming the peninsula Tavrida, it was Tatar architecture, not the myriad ancient Greek ruins in Kerch or Feodosia, that Potemkin ordered restored and refurbished after the annexation; it was the krik (cry) of the adhan (call to prayer) that framed Catherine's reflections of her sojourn at the khan's summerhouse “v sredine busurman i very musul’manskoi” (“in the midst of Muslims and the Islamic faith”) during her visit to the peninsula in 1787; and it was in large part through characters drawn from the Tatar people that Semen Bobrov, with his epic Tavrida of 1798, introduced Crimea as a literary topos to readers in the metropole.14Iurii Lotman calls Semen Bobrov (1763?–1810) “a poet of genius”—but a poet of genius whose work is virtually forgotten today.15 At the turn of the nineteenth century, he stood alongside Mikhail Lomonosov and Gavriil Derzhavin in a triumvirate of Russian literary giants. In fact, Derzhavin himself envisioned Bobrov as his successor—that is, before he reportedly bestowed his poetic mantle on the young Pushkin in Tsarskoe Selo in 1815.16 Alongside Kondratii Ryleev, Vasilii Zhukovskii, and his close friend Aleksandr Radishchev, Bobrov was a member of the Free Society of Lovers of All-Russian Literature (Vol’noe obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti), actively participating in the publication of its journal Beseduiushchii grazhdanin (The Citizen in Conversation).17 In addition to acquiring the French typical of Saint Petersburg, he distinguished himself from many of his counterparts by his love and knowledge of English and German.18 Yet despite this prominent standing and this influence on the development of Russian literature, Bobrov's work has been republished on its own only once (in 2008) since 1804.In the words of one Russian critic, Bobrov is Crimea's literary Columbus, its “pervopoet” (“first-poet”).19 After the arrest of Radishchev in 1790, presumably fearing punishment and exile himself, Bobrov entered the service of the Department of the Black Sea Admiralty and traveled throughout the southern periphery of the Russian Empire for nearly ten years. His sojourns in Crimea led to the composition of what is regarded as his most accomplished work, Tavrida; ili, Moi letnii den’ v Tavricheskom Khersonese, liriko-epicheskoe stikhotvorenie (Taurida; or, My Summer Day in Chersonesos Taurica, a Lyrico-Epical Poem), which was published in 1798 and then revised in 1804 under the title Khersonida as the conclusion of his four-volume collection Rassvet polnochi (The Dawn of Midnight).20 Inspired by the second part (“Summer”) of James Thomson's The Seasons (1730), the poem has been described as “a comprehensive textbook” of Crimea, an almanac of its history, mythology, zoology, and geology that informs, to varying degrees, each and every subsequent poem featuring the peninsula in the Russian canon.21Bobrov's Crimean ur-text crafts the relationship between Crimean place and Tatar personality as an isomorphism, beginning at the level of form. Tavrida is the first poem in Russian literature to use an unrhymed iambic meter—a distinction largely attributable to the influence of Thomson's The Seasons, which was written in blank verse—and Bobrov accounts for his sonic experimentation in the poem's foreword thus: “Chitatel’! pozvol’ mne priznat'sia v shutku! u menia Tavricheskoe ukho, a Tavricheskie Muzul’mane ne liubiat kolokol’noho zvona” (“Dear reader! Permit me to confess in jest! I have a Crimean ear, and Crimean Muslims do not like the chimes of bells”).22 The attempt at religious humor aside, the poet explains that he must explore a new sound, a “Muslim” sound, in order to render Crimea in verse properly. Here a catalog of assonant and alliterative Crimean Tatar river names serves this project, as the lyrical persona imagines himself one with the clouds, gazing down on the rivers below: Zdes’ zriu ia Zuiu, Beshterek,Indal, Bulganak i Buzuk,Chto prygaiut s krutogo kamniaPenistoi shumnoi stopoi. (54)(Here I behold the Zuia, the Beshterek,The Indal, the Bulganak, and the Buzuk,Which leap off the steep rockIn a foamy, noisy throng.)Rushing waters and craggy cliffs, thunder and lightning, gales and squalls—Bobrov's Tavrida is frequently overcome at the level of content by the sublime, by images of natural phenomena inspiring awe, terror, and ecstatic joy. Its sixth song, titled “Groza nad tavricheskimi gorami” (“Thunder above the Mountains of Taurida”), begins with an ominous storm gathering speed and strength in the sky: V sei groznoi, bezobraznoi tucheI samyi mrak chermneet, rdeet,Sokryv v sebe istochnik bedstvii.…Letiat protivny vetry v tverdi,Spiraiut tuchi mezh soboiu;No dolu vse eshche spokoino;Bezmolv’e mrachno, rokovoeV iudoli tsarstvuet plachevnoi. (197)(In this terrible, monstrous cloudGloom itself grows crimson-red,Concealing within itself the source of disaster.…Fierce headwinds fly to the heavens,Clouds press in on themselves,But below all remains still;A morose, fateful calmReigns in the mournful valley.)The calm quickly gives way to chaos. Dolphins thrash about in darkening waves; birds scatter amid lightning and blistering rains; and mountain elms along the Salgir River begin to buckle and bow in fear before deafening thunder, the “voice of the heavens” (“pred glasom neba” [198]). In Tavrida, the Crimean landscape is a window to the awesome power and tumult of the natural world and a crucible through which the lyrical persona—and, ideally, his reader—comes to appreciate the fleeting nature of human existence. Representations of whirlwinds and violent lightning usher in moments for Bobrov to meditate intensely on the encroachment of death—and conversely, on a life made all the sweeter by an understanding of its ephemerality.If the sublime holds this promise of rebirth and self-renewal, Bobrov does not hesitate long before demonstrating the effects of its power on the once “timid” (“robkii”) landscape portrayed in the poem. The storm subsides to reveal a rainbow. Winds that threatened destruction now bring fresher, cleaner, lighter air. Revived and even strengthened by the tempest, fauna and flora enjoy a new welcome tranquility. Human life emerges from this storm in splendor as well—in the figure of Tsul’ma, a young Crimean Tatar princess intimately linked to the land around her. Sealing a correspondence between Crimean place and Tatar personality, Bobrov places her in a similitive relationship with the flora whose renewal is described only moments before: Tsul’ma is as “slender as a myrtle” (“stroina, kak mirt” [221]) and as “light as chamois” (“legka, kak serna” [221]). She is the “beauty and honor” (“krasa i chest’” [221]) of the Crimean Tatar nobility, a woman of integrity who prays to Allah for the return of her beloved Tatar mirza (noble) Selim. She appears in the poem surrounded by handmaidens, who comfort her with songs celebrating her “divine beauty” and reassure her of Selim's imminent arrival.Bobrov's Tavrida thus represents in intricate detail the physical bounty of Crimean place, simulating its power to stir passion by way of the sublime, and explores figures of Tatar personality in form and content whose unique beauty and ardor suggest a human manifestation of the land itself. This bond between the peninsula and a living Tatar culture, between a breathtaking landscape and the Muslim khanate—this vision of Crimea as a home of the Tatars—is offered as an object of aesthetic pleasure to readers in the early nineteenth-century metropole. One of these readers was a certain Aleksandr Pushkin.Pushkin admitted to “stealing” one or two lines from Tavrida for Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, which John Bayley calls his “most popular poem.”23 Its popularity was doubtlessly due in part to its exotic setting in the harem of Crimean Tatar Khan Selim Girei, where “young captives” (“plennitsy mladye”) frolic in cool pools: Raskinuv legkie vlasyKak idut plennitsy mladyeKupat'sia v zharkie chasy,I l’iutsia volny kliuchevyeNa ikh volshebnye krasy.24(Having let down their fine hair,Off go the young captivesTo bathe in the hot hours,The waves of the fountain flowingOver their enchanting beauties.)The scene is highly intertextual with Bobrov's Tavrida. Here are Tsul’ma's handmaidens, seeking refuge from the heat: Strui srebristy pogruzhaiaStydlivye krasy svoiRukami vlagu rassekaiut,Igraiut,—pleshchutsia,—smeiutsia….Kupal’nia kladna zashchishchaetOt sily solnechnogo znoia. (222)(Plunging their modest beauties into silvery streams[The girls] slash through the water with their hands,Playing, splashing, laughing….The cool bathing hut offers protectionFrom the power of the scorching sun.)While the male gaze of Pushkin's narrator is invasive, rending ineffectual the walls of the harem meant to maintain the honor of its residents, Bobrov's proves even more salacious and voyeuristic by acknowledging Tsul’ma's fear of being seen but nonetheless refusing to look away: Tut—robko Tsul’ma oziraias’,Posledniu risu nizlagaiet;Kakoi krasot vid obnazhilsia!Kakoi mir prelestei otkrylsia! (222)(Here—bashfully Tsul’ma looks around,Dropping the last garment;What a vision of beauty is exposed!What a world of delights is revealed!)Yet the cool waters of the bath cannot temper the “burning passion” (“znoinaia strast’” [222]) of the Tatar princess for the distant Selim. Bobrov's Tsul’ma is at once desperately passionate and prayerfully modest, offering a source from which the two heroines of Pushkin's Bakhchisaraiskii fontan may be seen to spring.Indeed, one of Pushkin's heroines, the Georgian Zarema, is desperately passionate, while the other, the Polish Mariia, is prayerfully modest. They figure at the center of what might be called a zeugmatic plot at the level of diegesis in Bakhchisaraiskii fontan. As with zeugma, the figure of speech in which one word governs two (or more) others and tends to do so incongruously, Pushkin's text gives us a Crimean Tatar khan who in effect governs Zarema and Mariia and relates to them in incongruous ways. The first is a fiery and amorous woman who returns Girei's affections; the second is a quiet and devout woman who does not. For all her loyalty to Girei, Zarema loses her position as his haseki, or principal concubine, to Mariia, who is given separate, secluded quarters far from the activity of the harem and the stern gaze of the eunuch. There Mariia, emotionally distant and romantically immature, grieves openly for the life taken from her: “V tishine dushi svoei/Ona liubvi eshche ne znala” (181) (“In the quiet of her soul/She still did not know love”). Mariia is subsequently visited in the dead of night by Zarema, who begs her to release Girei: “Otdai mne radost’ i pokoi,/Otdai mne prezhnego Gireia” (187–88) (“Return to me my happiness and tranquility,/Return my erstwhile Girei”).Just as zeugma combines both parallelism and ellipsis for dramatic effect, Pushkin's text reveals that both Mariia and Zarema die after this encounter—but does not recount fully how or why they do. Mariia and Zarema are simply “no more” (“Marii net”; “gruzinki net” [189–90]), although we do learn that Zarema was drowned by the guards of the harem. Did Zarema really kill Mariia, as the text intimates? Did Girei explicitly order Zarema's execution? What is the message of the inscription in the “strange characters” (“chuzhdymi … chertami” [190]) above the heterodoxical fountain erected at the end of the poem by the grieving khan, whose tears are symbolized in its running water? These questions are left open, and the elliptical feel of Bakhchisaraiskii fontan has contributed to the notion that it is “hiding something from its readers.”25The poem's incomplete, mysterious feel stands in some contrast to its symmetry, which is most evident in the many complementary and contrastive parallelisms oriented around the pairings of Mariia-Zarema and Girei-eunuch. Both Mariia and Zarema, for example, are beautiful captives torn from Christian homes and cast into the role of the khan's concubine. Mariia is a musical woman attuned to the world of spirit and Zarema a woman celebrated in music attuned to the world of the flesh: “Ia dlia strasti rozhdena” (“I was born for passion” [187]). Mariia comes from the Polish lands to the northwest, Zarema from Georgian lands to the southeast. These geographical origins, in fact, are constitutive of the identities of the two women; they define and confine them. Indeed, Pushkin establishes a tight correspondence between place and personality at the diegetic level of Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, virtually dissolving territorial form into cultural content and cultural content into territorial form. Mariia's corner of the harem, for instance, is a simulated piece of Poland, a holy refuge where she practices her faith unimpeded and reminisces about her homeland, “an intimate, better place” (“o blizkoi, luchshei storone” [182]). She never leaves this chamber alive. Zarema, by contrast, does move beyond her sanctioned area in the harem, eluding the eunuch under cover of darkness in order to confront Mariia. Yet this act is not a transgression; it is simple obedience to her fierce, impetuous nature, which she directly attributes to her geographical origins in a threat to her rival: “No slushai: esli ia dolzhna/tebe … knizhalom ia vladeiu,/ia bliz Kavkaza rozhdena” (188) (“But listen: if I have to … I have a dagger,/And I was born near the Caucasus”).Zarema makes a point of emphasizing that her place of birth is not Crimea—at the beginning of her appeal to Mariia, she explains, “Rodylas’ ia ne zdes’” (“I was not born here” [186])—for Crimea is the land of the Tatars, and Girei its metonym. The khan is often considered a “marginal” figure, a foil to the poem's two doomed heroines, but I would argue that he is the main character of Bakhchisaraiskii fontan.26 Compared to Zarema and Mariia, whose traits dictate their actions, he undergoes real change in the poem. After all, Zarema is introduced as unparalleled in her ability to speak the language of “ardent desire” (“plamennykh zhelanii” [180]), and her emotions lead her to Mariia with a dagger in hand. Mariia is introduced as young, meek, and saintly, and her innocence leads her to receive Zarema without a word of protest. Girei, by contrast, defies first impressions and experiences a dramatic transformation from potentate to impotent. In the opening lines of the poem, even when troubled, he is portrayed as the fearsome, scowling scourge of Rus’ and Poland. The prominent caesura in the first line distinguishes his position and his station: “Girei sidel, potulia vzor” (“Girei sat, looking downward” [175]). The Crimean Tatar Girei is literally a sitting monarch, and all look up to him, respecting his authority. Yet by the end of the poem, he is a man rendered weak and ineffectual, especially on the field of battle: On chasto v sechakh rokovykhPod’emlet sabliu, i s razmakhaNedvizhim ostaetsia vdrug,Gliadit s bezumiem vokrug,Bledneet, budto polnyi strakha,I chto-to shepchet, i poroiGoriuchi slezy l’et rekoi. (189)(Often in fateful moments he wouldHoist his saber, and with a swingSuddenly stand motionless,Look around senselessly,Grow pale, as if seized with fear,And whisper something, and now and thenTears of sorrow would flow like a river.)These inaudible whispers underscore Girei's complete silence throughout the story. The khan has no voice; silently (“molcha”) does he move about the harem. He communicates in glances and gestures, dismissing his court, for example, “with an impatient wave of his hand.” Now that he can no longer brandish his sword, Girei has become as mute and emasculated as the eunuch, his counterpart in this symmetrical text. Both Girei and the eunuch are stolid figures of authority who hold the lives of the harem in their hands. Their fates are closely intertwined: the eunuch's every action is determined by a command of the khan, and the khan's rule and lineage are preserved by the eunuch's actions in regulating the harem.This conflation of Girei and the eunuch at the end of Bakhchisaraiskii fontan is key, I would argue, to an interpretation of the diegesis that has been largely overlooked in literary scholarship. Pushkin's text may be read as, inter alia, a tragedy of dynastic succession—or lack thereof. Behind the poem's veil of harem romance and intrigue is a story of the failure of Khan Girei to ensure the survival of his line. Vissarion Belinskii is one prominent critic who asserts the centrality of Girei to the poem but passes over this reading, characterizing Bakhchisaraiskii fontan as a simple love story: “Mysl’ poemy—pererozhdenie (esli ne prosvetlenie) dikoi dushi cherez vysokoe chuvstvo liubvi” (“The idea of the poem is the rebirth (if not the enlightenment) of a savage soul by way of the lofty feeling of love”).27 Yet the reader never encounters Girei in love per se. Over the course of the poem he shares no intimate moments with Zarema or Mariia and professes no affection for either woman. Only in Zarema's lengthy appeal to Mariia—that is, secondhand—does the reader learn that Girei and his Georgian consort once “breathed happiness in never-ending rapture” (“v bespreryvnom upoen’e/Dyshali schast’em” [187]). Even the narrator is unsure of the khan's feelings, repeatedly investigating the reasons for his deep malaise: “Chto dvyzhet gordoiu dushoiu?/Kakoiu mysl’oi zaniat on?” (“What drives this proud soul?/What thought occupies him?” [175]). Is it unrequited love that has Girei brooding intensely in the poem—or rather fear for the stable perpetuation of his rule?For all the orientalized and sexualized exoticism it represented for the non-Muslim world, the harem was in reality a circumscribed domain of family politics where the ruler sought to perpetuate his power.28 Women were chosen ultimately for the purpose of reproduction, and this consideration may account for Girei's hasty and unexplained abandonment of Zarema. Indeed, for all the descriptions of her beauty, passion, and power of seduction, Zarema is never characterized as a mother. The khan is never characterized as a father. Accordingly, he may be seen to spare Mariia no privilege or courtesy because in Bakhchisarai she represents the hope of the harem, the new prospective valide sultan, the future mother of the heir. Her untimely death, however, ends the promise of the harem and spells the dissolution of his rule: Zabytyi, predannyi prezren’iu,Garem ne zrit ego litsa;Tam, obrechennye muchen’iu,Pod strazhei khladnogo skoptsaStareiut zheny. (189–90)(Forgotten, scornfully cast aside,The harem does not see [Girei's] face;There, doomed and tormented,Under the watch of the cold castratoThe women grow old.)The “cold castrato” appears to be the eunuch, but Pushkin injects a modicum of ambiguity into this identity with the poem's only use of “skoptsa,” which maintains the masculine rhyme with “litsa.” The term “skopets’” stands out in a work in which the eunuch is repeatedly and consistently referred to as “evnukh”—whereas Girei is known by a number of epithets (“khan,” “povelytel’,” “bich,” “Tataryn buinyi”). Could the prosodical bond between “litsa” and “skoptsa” imply that the khan and the “castrato” are one and the same?This identification is ultimately not supported by the progression of events in the diegesis—in subsequent lines it is revealed that Girei is at war while the harem languishes—but the point is that the text of Bakhchisaraiskii fontan invites readers to perform an interpretative double take and consider a more profound interchangeability between the figures of the eunuch and the khan. It invites them to read the text as a tragedy of dynastic succession. Indeed, the problem of succession was not insignificant to Pushkin in this period; his historical drama Boris Godunov (1825), written very soon after Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, centers on the demise of the Riurik line during the “Smutnoe vremia” (“Time of Troubles” [1598–1613]). Godunov is a famously fragmentary and “incomprehensible” play that intrigued, even alienated, readers immediately upon its appearance—and that, by Pushkin's own account, drew its inspiration from Shakespeare.29 Crises of patrilineal succession, one of which gripped Russia at the time of the Decembrist revolt of 1825, are of course never very far from the center of the Bard's tragedies and historical chronicles; Macbeth, to cite one prominent ex