I'm just going to re-post this here, with a few of my comments at the very end. Thanks to Bob Buller for his research.
On the Origin of the Name of
Alexanderwohl Village
By Bob Buller
Spring 2018
We now take up
consideration of one of the more incredible claims that the 1848 Alexanderwohl
community report (Gemeindebericht) makes, one repeated in every account
of Alexanderwohl’s history that I have encountered. The claim relates to how
the village received its name. The relevant section of the community report
reads as follows:
When
this community, which had existed as a church in Prussia for over 200 years,
emigrated to Russia under the leadership of its church Ältester (elder),
Peter Wedel, they rested for two days on the south side of the city of Warsaw.
Tsar Alexander I—may he rest in peace—and a segment of his troops were outside
the city engaging in field manoeuvres. We waited anxiously when the tsar, who
had been alerted by several passing generals, stopped his carriage and beckoned
with his right hand. Several church leaders ran to him and were asked where we
came from and where we were going. When he heard we were going to Molotschna in
southern Russia the tsar said: “I wish you luck on your journey. Greet your
brethren for I have been there.” This happened on September 14, 1820.
When
we arrived in Molotschna these greetings were promptly conveyed by Peter Wedel,
our Ältester, to the congregations gathered in the churches. When the
office in Ekaterinoslav heard of this extraordinary event, the chief judge
Fadeyev immortalized it by naming the colony Alexanderwohl because, as he said,
“Tsar Alexander has wished you well.”
Before we look at
the details of the report, we need to discuss what type of literature this
portion of the report actually is. In form and function it corresponds to a
literary type in folklore and biblical studies commonly known as an etiological
tale. George Coats explains that this type is “a narrative designed in its
basic structure to support some kind of explanation for a situation or name
that exists at the time of the storyteller” (1983, 318). Etiological tales,
then, often give the story behind why something bears a certain name. Clearly,
the Alexanderwohl community report fits the bill according to that definition:
it explains how the village got its name.
What is
interesting about etiological tales is that, although some of them originate in
an actual event (i.e., they report how something came to be, how a name was
assigned), many of them are after-the-fact explanations that make sense of the
end result but actually have no basis in history or reality.
Several of the
claims can be judged reliable without any further investigation: a sizable
group from the (Przechówko) church did emigrate to
Russia under the leadership of Elder Peter Wedel in 1820, and presumably they
made periodic rest stops along the way; Alexander I, the son of Paul I (reigned
1796–1801) and grandson of Catherine the Great (1762–1796), was tsar from 1801
to 1825; and Andrei Mikhailovich Fadeev was the chairman of the Ekaterinoslav
Bureau of the Guardianship Committee in 1820 (he succeeded Samuel Contenius in
1818). Finally, the German word wohl does indeed mean “well,” so the
etiology makes sense from a lexical perspective. (It may surprise readers to
learn that some etiologies of this type fail on a lexical level.)
Other claims will
be the focus of our investigation:
1.
Is it
conceivable that the tsar of Russia was on maneuvers in Poland in 1820?
2.
Is
there evidence that Tsar Alexander I was in Warsaw on 14 September 1820?
To answer the
first of these questions, we must engage in more than a little history.
1.
The Partitions of Poland
The Kingdom of
Poland had its territory systematically reduced through three successive
partitions in the waning years of the eighteenth century. In 1772, 1793, and
1795 Russia, Prussia, and Austria divvied up Polish territory to add to their
expanding realms. Very important to note is that the city of Warsaw never fell
under Russian rule during this time.
2.
The Duchy of Warsaw
Of course,
Napoleon failed in his attempt to conquer and subdue Russia, and when his army
retreated from Russian territory in December 1812 the Russians filled the
vacuum and assumed control over most of the Duchy of Warsaw (the Prussians
reclaimed the rest).
3.
Congress Poland
The Russian rule
over the former Duchy of Warsaw was formalized through an agreement once again
made between the powers (victors against Napoleon) of the day: Russia, Austria,
Prussia, and the United Kingdom. At the Congress of Vienna, which lasted from November
1814 to June 1815, Tsar Alexander I proposed, and the other participants
surprisingly agreed, to form the Kingdom of Poland (more commonly known as
Congress Poland in recognition of its origin—an etiology of sorts). The
surprising aspect of the assent is that, although the new state was technically
independent with its own constitution (Congress Poland was a constitutional
monarchy), its rulers were to be the Russian tsars. In short, Polish
independence was more hypothetical than real, and Alexander I was
simultaneously tsar of Russia and king of Poland.
In 1807, during
the middle of the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century (1803–1815),
the Prussians ceded their territory to Napoleon, who immediately established a
Polish state that would provide him and his army material aid in their war
against the Russians to the east. As is evident in the map below, the area of
the Duchy of Warsaw corresponded roughly to the areas that Prussia had
partitioned in 1793 and 1795 and Austria in 1795.
So, therefore, is
it conceivable that the tsar of Russia was on maneuvers in Poland in 1820?
Clearly, given the fact that Tsar Alexander I was ruler of Congress Poland
beginning in 1815 and continued his rule over Poland through the end of his
reign in 1825, it is plausible to imagine him on maneuvers south of Warsaw in
September 1820.
This leaves only
one more question to answer: Is there evidence that Tsar Alexander I was in
Warsaw on 14 September 1820?
The answer to our
question is found in a book of memoirs written by Sophie de Tisenhaus
Choiseul-Gouffier, a member of the Lithuanian nobility in the Polish–Lithuanian
Commonwealth of the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries. Sophie met Alexander I in
1812, and they remained close friends until his death in late 1825. One
indication of the closeness of their relationship is that Alexander was
godfather of Sophie’s only son with her husband, the French Count Louis Antoine
de Choiseul Island Oktavija-Gufjė.
Choiseul-Gouffier
was a prolific author, with a number of novels to her credit, but the work that
is of interest to us is her 1829 Mémoires historiques sur l’empereur
Alexandre et la cour de Russie, translated into English many years later as
Historical Memoirs of the Emperor Alexander I. and the Court of Russia
(1904). A friend and confidant of Alexander during the last two decades of his
life, Choiseul-Gouffier serves as a reliable and contemporary source for
information about the Russian tsar.
Choiseul-Gouffier
reports, for example: “In the year 1816 I made a journey to Carlsbad, with my
father and one of my relatives. Upon our return we stopped at Warsaw, where the
emperor was expected on the 30th of September” (221). The year is wrong for our
purposes, but the location is right. Further, one cannot help but be intrigued
by what follows. After Alexander arrived, he and the other Warsaw elite
attended a ball, where he danced and engaged in banter with Choiseul-Gouffier.
Sometime later, she reports,
The
emperor left the ball at eleven o’clock. He kept early hours, rising very early
in the morning, either to be present at the drilling of the soldiers or to work
with his ministers. The next day he had a grand review of the Polish army, on
the plain of Povonski, which was covered with an immense throng of people in
carriages, on foot, and on horseback, all come to witness this brilliant
military spectacle. (222)
Still the wrong
year, but now we have the right action: Alexander, clad in a “Polish uniform
with the blue and white plume on his cap” (221), surveying the drilling of the
soldiers and a “brilliant military spectacle” that Choiseul-Gouffier refers to,
strikingly, as “manœuvres” (223). The military review took place on the plain
of Povonski, a site said to be three miles from Warsaw at that time (no source
indicates, however, which direction it lay from Warsaw).
This is not,
fortunately, the only time that Choiseul-Gouffier encountered Alexander in
Warsaw. Later she explains that she wished to leave Paris but without
dishonoring her husband. She initially sought to have him appointed to a post
in Russia, but that did not transpire due to Alexander making his choice before
her letter arrived. Still, she remained determined to leave France, so
in
1820 I made a journey to Lithuania, and M. de C. [Choiseul-Gouffier’s husband]
being engaged in defending himself against a very unjust lawsuit, I decided to
go to Warsaw where his Majesty was at that time, and ask justice and protection
from him. (241–42)
Now we are in the
right year and the right place. Choiseul-Gouffier continues her account by
noting that once again she and Alexander met at a ball, where they danced and
conversed and she made her plea that Alexander intervene in the lawsuit in
favor of her husband. Alexander agreed and asked her to supply the details of
the case. Choiseul-Gouffier intended to do so at a following ball but arrived
late and did not meet Alexander at all. The morning after the second ball,
Choiseul-Gouffier reports, Alexander sent a messenger to inquire about her
health, since he had not seen her the night before. We pick up
Choiseul-Gouffier’s narrative at that point:
As
I proposed to stay only a few days at Warsaw, his Majesty, learning that I was
on the eve of my departure, deigned to come and receive my respectful adieux,
saying that he had hoped that I would prolong my stay at Warsaw until the term
fixed for his Majesty’s own departure, twelve days later, when he was to go to
the conference of Troppan in Silesia. (244)
Here at last we
find a piece of evidence that will enable us to date Alexander’s 1820 stay in
Warsaw: the conference in Troppan, more commonly known as Troppau. In 1820 the
five great European powers of the day—Russia, Austria, Prussia, United Kingdom,
and France—met in the city of Troppau (modern Opava, Czech Republic) to discuss
an uprising and revolution in Naples, Italy. The details of that conference can
be ignored; what is crucial for our purposes is the date of the conference: it
began 20 October 1820.
Troppau lay
approximately 200 miles southwest of Warsaw, so if one estimates that Alexander
and his party covered 30 miles a day (they no doubt traveled faster than the
Mennonites emigrating from Przechówko to Molotschna), then their journey
required a week. To be safe, we might imagine that it took anywhere between
five and nine days, but we will use seven days for our rough calculations.
Let us assume that
Alexander arrived no later than 19 October. A seven-day journey would have thus
begun on 13 October. Alexander last saw Choiseul-Gouffier twelve days before
his departure, which would have been, by our reckoning, 1 October. The several
balls that Choiseul-Gouffier mentions took place before then, during the last
week of September. Choiseul-Gouffier also reports that the tsar was already in
Warsaw when she made her decision to travel there from Paris, which was no
doubt a substantial and time-consuming journey.
What does this
mean for our question? It seems indisputable that Alexander I was in Warsaw
when the Mennonite group from Przechówko rested south of the city on and around
14 September 1820. At least the basic facts of the etiological tale are
confirmed: Alexander and the Przechówko Mennonites were at the same place at
the same time, just as the Alexanderwohl community report claims.
The only
confirmation that we lack is that of Alexander participating in field maneuvers
with Polish troops while the Przechówko church members rested for two days.
However, the fact that he did exactly that in an earlier stay at Warsaw lends
credence to the claim that he also did so in 1820. Emperors of all times
generally like to be seen directing their troops; Alexander was presumably no
exception.
All the pieces of
the etiology either fit or seem highly plausible, so we have little reason to
doubt the other main element of the report: Alexander conversed briefly with
several church leaders and, upon learning from where they came and to where
they were headed, wished them luck. We will, or course, never have definitive
confirmation of this final detail, but we also have no valid reason to doubt
it.
1.
Alexander I
Alexander’s quoted
dialogue (from the 1848 community report) is only two sentences long, but each
is worthy of notice. We begin with the second sentence: “Greet your brethren
for I have been there.” Alexander’s statement is no throw-away line. In fact,
Alexander had visited Molotschna colony just two years prior. Peter M.
Friesen’s The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia includes a first-person
account from the Mennonite head of the household that Alexander visited: David
Hiebert of Lindenau, Molotschna (Friesen 1980, 173–75).
His
Majesty ate with apparent appetite, drank beer and coffee, and, while eating
enquired as to our circumstances in the most affable manner: how long we had
been in his empire, how we liked it and whether or not we had any complaints
about anyone. To this we answered: “No, but we would like to thank Your
Imperial Majesty for his great mercy and gracious reception. We would also like
to request grace and Your Majesty’s protection for the future; not only for ourselves
but also for our brothers-in-the-faith in Prussia, who because of the great and
difficult war, have come into dire straits, so that they too might find
acceptance and support here.” Thereupon the emperor said to my wife: “Yes, dear
child, it shall be done.” (175)
Although we cannot
verify the details of the story—the Hieberts’ request on behalf of the Prussian
Mennonites who were expected to make their way to Russia or Alexander’s promise
to give aid and support to future immigrants—we should note that this account
is entirely consistent with the second sentence of Alexander’s comment: he had
personally visited Molotschna, so he asked the traveling group from Przechówko to
greet their fellow Mennonites when they arrived at their final destination in
Molotschna.
The first sentence
merits close scrutiny as well, since it may affect how we understand and
interpret the etiology of the village name. Alexander begins his dialogue with
a simple statement: “I wish you luck on your journey.” Note first that
Alexander expressed a wish; he did not make a promise or offer concrete
assistance. Second, his wish was for the journey, not for their lives once they
arrived in Molotschna. We might speculate on why he limited his wish to the
journey, but for now we simply note it as potentially important for our
understanding of this tale. Third, Alexander wished them luck, or Glück
in German, an important word choice in light of what follows.
2.
Andrei Mikhailovich Fadeev
Now that we have
observed exactly what Alexander said, we can read with greater insight what the
district mayor Fadeyev said when he named the village. We begin by noting first
that the Przechówko group did exactly what Alexander asked when they arrived:
they conveyed the tsar’s greetings to all their fellow Mennonites. Then we are
told that the district office in Ekaterinoslav heard of “this extraordinary
event,” Fadeyev “immortalized” it by giving the village (colony in the
terminology of that day) a particular name.
At the risk of
sounding cynical, I find the characterization of the tsar’s wish as an
extraordinary event a bit of a stretch. Alexander wished the party good luck on
their journey, in other words, safe travels. He also asked them to greet people
he had previously met. Neither of these qualify, in my view, as anything out of
the ordinary; they are, rather, niceties that one would hope are more mundane
than spectacular. Certainly one would not expect a wish for someone to have
safe travels to be immortalized in a village name.
We should also
note that Alexander did not wish the Przechówko Mennonites well (German wohl),
as Fadeyev claims in this account; in fact, he wished them luck, Glück.
One must wonder why the village is not more accurately named Alexanderglück, to
immortalize what Alexander actually said. Something is wrong with this picture;
the details at the end of the account seem at odds with those at its beginning.
We have
established thus far that it is both plausible and highly likely that Alexander
encountered the Przechówko Mennonites south of Warsaw. The report of their
encounter, with its wish for safe travels and a request to greet the Mennonites
whom Alexander had met just two years previously, also has the ring of truth to
it. Still, when we get to the whole point of the tale, an explanation of what
the village name means, the internal logic of the story starts to fall apart
and makes much less sense.
This leads me to
wonder whether, although the larger story of the encounter is historically
accurate, the precise explanation given for the naming is somewhat less than
true. I am not suggesting that the Alexanderwohl settlers made anything up, but
I do think we should ask whether there may be a better explanation for the
village name than the one that Fadeyev supplied and the townspeople adopted
into their historical self-understanding.
On its surface,
the explanation for the naming of Alexanderwohl sounds plausible: Alexander
wished the Przechówko party well, so the village they settled was named
accordingly: Alexanderwohl, which combines Alexander’s name plus the German
word for “well.” Most etiologies sound plausible on the surface, but frequently
they become suspect when one digs a little deeper.
So it is with the
Alexanderwohl etiological tale: the details of the story do not all correspond
to the simple etiological explanation. That is, Alexander wished the party
luck, not well, and the mundane character of the encounter, essentially wishing
someone safe travels, would not typically warrant any sort of memorialization,
let alone the naming of a village.
Without calling
into question the basic facts of the story, one wonders if the explanation
given is the real meaning of the village name. Such skepticism increases when
one considers a similarly named Molotschna village, namely, Mariawohl.
This village was
one of the last founded in Molotschna, in 1857. According to Helmut Huebert,
the village “was named in honour of Wilhelmia Maria, wife of the recently
crowned Czar Alexander II” (Huebert 2003, 158). In other words, this village
received its name by combining the name of the person being honored plus the
German word wohl, or “well.” In this case there is no hint that Maria
wished the townspeople well. On the contrary, the village name is more likely
an expression of well wishes to the person whose name provides the first part
of the village name. The village name is thus a shorthand way of saying: May it
be well with Maria.
Why would not the
same explanation be applied to Alexanderwohl? If we did not have the story of
the encounter in Poland, we would naturally think that the village name was
intended more to honor Alexander than to commemorate a brief encounter between
Alexander and the Mennonites in which the tsar wished them safe travels. In
this explanation, the village name was a vehicle for expressing a wish of good
things for the tsar: May it be well with Alexander.
This clearly is
not the perspective of the etiological tale, but it makes better sense of the
way some village names were created at that place and time. There was, after
all, a clear precedent for naming a Molotschna village after Alexander. In
1820, one year before the founding of Alexanderwohl, the village of
Alexandertal was founded. The -tal suffix simply indicates that the
village was located in a valley; the primary emphasis is on the person being
honored by the village name: Alexander I.
Similarly, in 1857
the Molotschna colony saw the founding of Alexanderkrone (where Peter D and
Sarah Siebert Buller lived for a few years). This village was named in honor of
Alexander II, husband of the Maria honored by the naming of Mariawohl. The German
word Krone means “crown” in English, which suggests that the village
name meant something like Crown of Alexander. The point, again, is that the
village name honored the one after whom it was named.
To bring this all
back around to Alexanderwohl, one need not be a skeptic to find the etiological
tale a little suspicious at the end. Granted, Alexander likely met and
conversed with the Przechówko group south of Warsaw, and they dutifully shared
his greetings with their fellow Mennonites in Molotschna. All that seems not
only plausible but likely.
However, when
Fadeyev named the village—and we should not lose sight of the fact that Fadeyev
was the one who named the village, not the Alexanderwohl settlers—he probably
was more interested in currying favor with his tsar than in memorializing the
tsar’s encounter with a party of Mennonite immigrants. Given the fact that just
a year earlier Fadeyev had named another Molotschna village to honor Alexander,
and in light of the plain meaning of the -wohl suffix in the later
village Mariawohl, it seems most plausible to conclude that the village
Alexanderwohl was given its name as a means of expressing a positive wish to a
much-loved tsar: May it be well with Alexander.
The association of
the account of the journey and encounter with the naming of Alexanderwohl is,
in all likelihood, secondary. It may be that Fadeyev named the village for the
reason just given but told the Alexanderwohl settlers that the name commemorated
their extraordinary encounter with the tsar. Fadeyev may have told them, in
other words, what he thought they would like to hear.
It is equally
possible, in my view, that the etiology proper—“When the office in
Ekaterinoslav heard of this extraordinary event, the chief judge Fadeyev
immortalized it by naming the colony Alexanderwohl because, as he said, ‘Tsar
Alexander has wished you well.’”—was the villagers’ own creation over time,
their attempt to make sense of the village name in light of their own history
with the tsar.
We may never know
the precise origin of the etiology proper, but it does seem more likely than
not that the etiological tale of the naming of Alexanderwohl is both generally
true but mistaken in its final detail.
Work Cited:
Choiseul-Gouffier, Sophie de Tisenhaus. 1904. Historical
Memoirs of the Emperor Alexander I. and the Court of Russia. Translated by Mary
Berenice Patterson. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner. Originally published
Mémoires historiques sur l’empereur Alexandre et la cour de Russie (1829).
Die Gemeindeberichte von 1848 der deutschen Siedlungen am
Schwarzen Meer; (23) Alexanderwohl (Pp 131, 132), edited by M.
Woltner, S. Hitzel, Leipzig, 1941.
Friesen, Peter M. 1980. The Mennonite Brotherhood in
Russia, 1789–1910. 2nd ed. Translated by J. B. Toews, Abraham Friesen,
Peter J. Klassen, and Harry Loewen. Fresno, CA: Board of Christian Literature,
General Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches.
Huebert, Helmut T. 2003. Molotschna Historical Atlas.
Winnipeg: Springfield.
I'll just make one addition to Buller's research above. Mention is made of military maneuvers performed on the "Plain of Povonski". I'll suggest that this location is equivalent to Powązki. One can see this location on the 1839 map below. It's situated immediately to the west of Warsaw proper. The pronunciation of Powązki in Polish would be something like "Povanski" - that ą makes kind of a "an" sound (as an equivalent to English).
Today, the location is within the metropolitan Warsaw area. It's a famous and historical cemetery that was established toward the end of the 18th century.
So the location of the tsar's military maneuvers, I feel, was likely to the west of Warsaw while the Przechowko emigrants are said to have stopped/camped to the south of the city.
