My Life's Travels and Adventures: An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland by Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: My Life's Travels and Adventures: An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland by Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa Daniel O'Quinn Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa, My Life's Travels and Adventures: An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland, ed. and trans. by Władysław Roczniak ( Toronto: Iter Press, 2021). Pp. 305. $53.95 paper. Scholars in a wide range of fields should be grateful both to Władysław Roczniak and to the Iter Press for bringing this fine critical edition of Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa's extraordinary memoir My Life's Travels and Adventures to an English-speaking audience. A welcome reminder of the degree to which "eighteenth-century studies" remains focused on Western Europe and its colonial holdings, Pilsztynowa's narrative lies at the crossroads of Slavic and Ottoman studies. Dated 1760, her manuscript was written during the author's second lengthy stay in Istanbul. Despite its explicit framing as an injunction to piety, the memoir seeks to both entertain and edify her readers by blending a fast-paced account of her lengthy sojourns in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and the Balkans with a broad array of anecdotes and historical vignettes. It was first published in Poland in the early twentieth century by a male scholar as a warning against women's emancipation. The text itself provides an ample rebuttal to any such paternalism. The very text in which Pilsztynowa writes herself into existence demonstrates that the ostensible protections provided by marriage are at best a fantasy and at worst an alibi for men's traffic in women and their property. Her memoir starts in 1732 with her forced marriage at age 14 to a Polish oculist named Jacob Helpir and her immediate transplantation to Istanbul. Her husband is imprisoned almost immediately after the death of a patient and over the next few pages Pilsztynowa proves herself to be an adept negotiator, a quick study in the medical arts (although we are never far away from sorcery and sheer luck), and an able operator in the multi-linguistic, multi-faith society of Istanbul and the war-torn Balkans. The same chapter is also chock full of anti-Semitic episodes (throughout the book, Jewish doctors and pharmacists conspire to destroy her and her practice), accounts of purchasing prisoners as slaves (something of a hostage broker, she buys Christians from the Ottomans and Ottomans from the Russians with the intent of selling them back to their families), and scenes of marital abandonment and abuse (her husbands and other male companions can be counted on to steal from her at every turn). In the opening thirty pages, the reader is confronted with so many types of narrative discourse that one is forced to adjudicate between what is legend, what is pure fabrication, and what is ostensibly accurate reporting. Roczniak's illuminating annotations and appendices allow the reader not only to keep track of her wildly peripatetic itinerary but also her narrative embellishments. As a reader with no experience of Polish memoir literature and only a rudimentary sense of the conflicted history of the region, I found the editor's guidance incredibly helpful. The introduction admirably summarizes this unruly text and her complex itinerary before providing a genealogy of how Pilsztynowa's work has been read in Slavic studies. After its stint as an example of what not to do with one's life, it has emerged as a crucial text for thinking about women's writing in the period. Unlike the travel writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu or Elizabeth Craven with which this text will inevitably be compared, My Life's Travels and Adventures is the product of a woman, who, although a member of the minor gentry, lives by her wits and her professional skills for close to thirty [End Page 130] years abroad. In comparison, Montagu's and Craven's experiences are both more narrow and far less risky. Caught in a world of perpetual war, Pilsztynowa's life depends frequently on the outcome of her rather dubious cures or on her power to advocate for herself in the courts of various rulers or with a host of...