Hero of Ukraine, Ethiopia, Manchuria, and Mount Athos
Returning to an epic story, after forty years.
Alexander Bulatovich (1870–1919) was a soldier, explorer, and religious leader whose field of action ranged from Tsarist Russia to Ethiopia to Manchuria to Mount Athos. The historical novel Name of Hero covers his life as a cavalry officer and African explorer, up through the Manchurian campaign of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Now forty years after publication of The Name of Hero, prompted by current war raging near where Bulatovich grew up, I’m returning to the story, to put that story in a broader context and to recount the rest of his life, as I had originally planned.
After Manchuria, Bulatovich returned to Petersburg, became a monk, then went to Mount Athos and became involved in a bitter heresy dispute. As a chaplain in World War I, he was decorated for lead troops into battle. He survived the Russian Revolution, only to be murdered at his family’s estate, in Ukraine, near Sumy, in December 1919.
The odd shifts in his life first drew me to Bulatovich, the puzzle of what motivated him. He seemed driven by a need to push himself to his limits, in whatever he did.
I was also drawn by the strangeness of the events — Russian explorers in Ethiopia, the Russian conquest of Manchuria, a heresy battle in the twentieth century. I wanted to understand the man and his time, to get some insight into how the people and circumstances could have interacted to produce such events.
I first discovered Bulatovich in the London Times of 1913. I was hunting through microfilms looking for leads for another story when I chanced on a article describing how Russian troops had besieged two monasteries at Mount Athos in Greece and exiled some 880 monks to remote parts of the Russian Empire for believing that “the Name of God was a part of God and, therefore, in itself divine.” Anthony Bulatovich, a former Guards officer and African explorer, was the leader and defender of the monks.
News was a far more leisurely business then than now. The reporter drew an analogy to characters in a novel by Anatole France and drew an interesting sketch of the background and motivations of the main figure. I got the impression of Bulatovich as a restless man, full of energy, chasing from one end of the world to the other in search of the meaning of life. Eventually, he had sought quiet as a monk at Mount Athos, only to find himself once again in the midst of a battle.
I was in the Army then (1970), a reservist stationed in San Angelo, Texas. When I returned to Boston and then to graduate school, I tracked down all available leads, but could uncover very little additional information. There was a poem by Mandelshtam about the heresy. The philosopher Berdyaev had nearly been sent to Siberia for expressing support for the heretics. But that was it. I tried spinning a largely fictional account around these few facts, but never got very far.
Then in the spring of 1972, the “B” volume of the new edition of the Soviet Encyclopedia appeared. The previous edition had mentioned an “Alexander” Bulatovich who died about 1910. The Bulatovich in the Times article was named “Anthony” and was very much alive in 1913. The new edition made it clear that Alexander and Anthony were the same man. (One changes one’s name when one becomes a monk). The item was signed by I.S. Katsnelson, a professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow. I wrote to him, and he replied immediately, sending me a copy of a book he had just published — a new edition of two long-out-of-print books by Bulatovich about his experiences in Ethiopia (1896–98), together with a biographical introduction.
Katsnelson specialized in ancient Egypt and Sudan. He had written several books on ancient Egyptian literature and a major monograph on early Sudan. His interest in Bulatovich’s activities in Ethiopia was a sideline. He was very helpful, providing me not only with copies of his books but also with the address of Bulatovich’s 98-year-old sister, Princess Mary (Mariya or “Meta”) Orbeliani, who was then living in British Columbia. From that point on, one lead led to another.
In the summer of 1972, I traveled to Mount Athos and visited the one remaining Russian monastery there. On the way I met a scholar, Popoulidis, in Salonika who was writing a doctoral dissertation on the heresy. And in Athens, at the National Library, I found and photocopied a book Bulatovich had written about the heresy. At Harvard’s Widener Library and at Hellenic College in Brookline, Massachusetts, I found more articles and books by and about Bulatovich and the heresy.
The following summer I visited Princess Mary Orbeliani in Penticton, British Columbia. In long tape-recorded conversations and in letters before and after that visit, she provided me with valuable information about her brother’s life and insight into his character. At 99 she was very articulate, lucid, and helpful. She was a remarkable and very memorable person in her own right — at that time still active as a water-color artist and pianist. (She passed away in 1977 at the age of 103.)
Back in Boston, I tracked down references to Bulatovich’s participation in the Manchurian campaign of the Boxer Rebellion. The only work in English dealing with that campaign, The Russo-Chinese War by George A. Lensen, mentioned Bulatovich often in the few chapters dealing with battles at Ongun, Hailar, Yakeshi, and the Greater Hsing-An Mountains. The comprehensive bibliography led me to the source materials: two versions of General Orlov’s autobiographical account of the campaign, one in book form and one in an historical journal, both available at the Widener Library. Also, at that time, Mary Orbeliani’s son, Bulatovich’s nephew, Andre, found and sent me a copy of the handwritten official record of Bulatovich’s military career, with many previously unknown details on the Manchurian campaign.
Gradually, the story began to take shape in my mind as a trilogy, the first volume of which became The Name of Hero.
For the background, the historical events, and the details of camp life, I stayed very close to my sources. The major events of the campaign and of Bulatovich’s life as recorded in this volume are true, to the best of my knowledge. But I wasn’t interested in simply presenting a series of historical facts. I was fascinated by Bulatovich’s character. I wanted to work out the puzzle of his motivations, to figure out what could have led to all the shifts and twists of his life story. In those areas, my sources were incomplete and often contradictory, giving me plenty of room to pick and choose, invent and discover, while remaining consistent with the historical probability.
As for the rest of the characters: I had some notion of General Orlov from his writings. He emphasized the feats of the enlisted men in his command, but he praised only one officer — Bulatovich. He quoted Bulatovich’s superiors, the commander and assistant commander of the regiment, only to present them in a negative light, as doctrinaire disciplinarians — in contrast to Bulatovich’s bravery, initiative, and bold individual style. Although Orlov listed the names of hundreds of enlisted men, he never gavs the names of this commander and assistant commander. I invented the names “Kupferman” and “Strakhov,” fleshed out their characters, and gave them each a backstory.
As for the Mazeppy, I knew from Mary Orbeliani that half a dozen men in Bulatovich’s command were so devoted to him that when he entered the monastery, they followed him there. I speculated that to be that close they would probably have been in battle together. According to Orlov and the military record, Bulatovich frequently led a small group on scouting missions. And according to Mary Orbeliani, his men called him “Mazeppa.” So I chose names from the general roster given by Orlov and dubbed the group “Mazeppy.”
Orlov described a fifty-four-year-old, white-haired giant of a Cossack named Starodubov, who received a medal for capturing an enemy flag at the Battle of Ongun. I invented the theft and moved him to Bulatovich’s command.
One of Bulatovich’s men named Butorin got caught behind enemy lines at Hailar and escaped very much as described in the novel. At Hailar, too, the headless bodies of three missing Cossacks were found near a temple. My description of that funeral, however, is fictitious.
The other enlisted men in Manchuria were invented, as was Chinese Sonya. One sparse and disputed account of an affair with an Ethiopian noblewoman was the basis for Asalafetch.
There were rumors of love interest between Bulatovich and Sophia Vassilchikova, but only her name and approximate age can be considered “historical.”
The same General Rennenkampf whom Bulatovich confronted in Manchuria was largely responsible for the disastrous Russian defeat at the Battle of Tannenburg at the beginning of World War I (see Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914).
There was an unexplained gap in Bulatovich’s military record. He did, in fact, rescue a French missionary named Lavesier or Lavoisier and later was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor for having done so. His sister described how he killed the young Chinese boy who attacked and wounded him on the return trip (a horrifying vision that recurred in his dreams). She also mentioned that he caught typhus form the missionary and that after he recovered he made a short trip to Japan. The military record says nothing about that trip and says that he was never on leave for convalescence from wounds. It just skips from the rescue of the missionary to about four months later when he was with another Russian army in another part of Manchuria. Apparently he had been left behind, considered as good as dead.
For background on Ethiopia, I relied heavily on Bulatovich’s own accounts.
Related posts:
A Hero of Ukraine and of Ethiopia
