Program of the International Conference "Polymorphic Commonwealth: Cultural Transfers in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania" (Fitzwilliam College | University of Cambridge, 26-27th September 2022) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cosmopolitanism as Subculture in the Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
in Identities In-Between in East-Central Europe, ed. by Jan Fellerer, Robert Pyrah and Marius Turda (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 149-69., 2019
In the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the former territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where there was previously one political nation – the imagined community of Polish-speaking aristocrats – there gradually emerged separate ethnolinguistic communities that vied for supremacy, frequently claiming the same spaces. This process was particularly heated in the eastern parts of the Commonwealth, which subsequently came to be known in Polish as the Kresy (literally, Eastern ‘limits’ or ‘verges’; often translated as ‘Former Eastern Provinces’). By the early 1900s, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Polish and Ukrainian ethnolinguistic nationalisms were mainstream ideologies, propounded in political writing, historiography, fiction and poetry. These nationalist narratives aligned the territory’s pre-national and multi-ethnic past with their own needs to construct national histories. Nonetheless, there were notable exceptions: writers and thinkers who saw the Commonwealth and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania not in exclusivist, monochromatic terms but as a polyphony of cultures. They made identity claims that countered the paradigmatic ethnonationalisms, and thereby complicated what it meant (or could mean) to be Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian or Ukrainian. These articulations of memory and identity are fruitfully analysed using the theory of ‘subcultures’ because they straddle the divide between majority and minority: a Polish cosmopolitan still claimed to be Polish, but rejected the hegemonic pull of ethnolinguistic nationhood. This paper considers examples of Polish intellectuals who produced narratives of subcultural memory. A particular focus is placed on Marian Zdziechowski (1861-1938), literary critic and philosopher born in what is now Belarus, whose writings about the Polish East starkly contrasted with most other treatments of the area’s cultural geography. A comparative analysis with contemporaneous writers of the ‘Kresy’ shows that Zdziechowski certainly went against the grain. Whilst, as professor and rector of the University of Wilno, he could hardly be considered a member of the subaltern classes, his ideas formed a peculiar subculture that would influence several major writers of the twentieth century, including Czesław Miłosz.
Approaches to Polish-Lithuanian / Belarusian and Ukrainian History before 1800 in the Context of Local, Regional and Transregional Entanglements, in: Das historische Litauen als Perspektive für die Slavistik Verflochtene Narrative und Identitäten Herausgegeben von Monika Bednarczuk und Marion Rutz, 2022
Open Access: https://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/pdfjs/web/viewer.html?file=/ddo/artikel/85044/978-3-447-11842-2\_Kostenloser%20Open%20Access-Download.pdf#pagemode=thumbs In this short essay I explore the multilingual1 and multireligious character of the multi- national Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Early Modern period. This state was home not only to significant Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish communities, but also to notable numbers of Armenians and Muslims. I set my study in the context of developments in historiography, which – in general works at least – has only recently turned its attention towards the abovementioned aspects of the the Early Modern Com- monwealth, even though they permeated all aspects of society. This applies, as I will show, on multiple scales, from individual cities4 through the regional level to the trans- regional. The primary focus of this study will be on the way historical research has ap- proached Poland-Lithuania, and in particular the Grand Duchy, and what imaginaries it has thus constructed. At the same time, or even more, this short piece is an outline of a prospective new approach drawing on a transregional and Transottoman perspective, influenced by the ongoing transnational turn in historiography. While historiography has played a key role in influencing current debates on memory cultures, I will only briefly touch upon those here. This paper outlines some of the far-reaching, transregional connections that shaped Poland-Lithuania, thus pointing towards new research questions that recognition of this could inspire. Indeed, Poland and Lithuania, as well as the partitioned territories that joined the Russian Empire, should always be considered in both their local and trans- regional contexts,5 and thus in their interconnections with Rusʹ, Ruthenia, Muscovy and the Petersburg Empire, as well as with the northern Black Sea region, the Ottoman Empire and Persia.
Historiography, Memory, and the Inheritance of Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth
IKSAD Publications, 2022
This article has focused on the first century, particularly on the crisis of the mid-seventeenth centuries historiography of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The problem emphasized the faintness of the Commonwealth, which led, more than a century later, to its partition; economic, social, and political supremacy of the Polish novel estate, the Szlachta; prohibiting other classes from political and social power; the faintness of the elected kingdom; using of liberum veto in 1652; and the rising disaffection of non-Catholics, above all, the rising of the Greek Orthodox Cossacks, were all the narratives behind the partition, as well as overwhelmed crisis of depopulation and the extensive destruction of the land. However, the ending of the social, economic, and political dominance of the Szlachta and the rise of the contemporary Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belarusian states were those features behind the rising of the Polish land in the long nineteenth century. The need for the excellent establishment of the national groups was reflected in how they saw the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's inheritance. In the context of the memory of the Commonwealth, Timothy Snyder, in his book "The Reconstruction of Nations" in 2003, "unify the early modern Polish nation and its multiple successors." He mentioned that a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-confessional Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth appeared after the Union of Lublin. According to the scholar (Timothy Snyder), terms are applied to nationality and development rather than linguistics and ethnicity. The purpose and objective of the paper are to discuss the desolation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout its history, its many legacies, and finally, the development of Polish land throughout the long nineteenth century. The result of the article has provided in-depth knowledge of the Commonwealth. The methodology of the paper followed through documentary analysis. The feature question of the form is, what is legacy today among those different groups and states?
The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth as a Border Experience of the City
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, European and Regional Studies
Referring to Fustel de Coulanges’ distinction of urbs and civitas, the article discusses political theory and practice in 16th-17th-century Poland. While in western Europe an important shift in the notion of politics took place, and the civitas aspect of cities deteriorated as they were conquered by new centralized nation-states, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was an attempt to recreate the ancient and mediaeval concept of civitas – a community of free citizens, actively participating in the government – at the state level. As its proponents, such as Stanisław Sarnicki, argued, Poland was to become a city rather than a state, and so the theoretical justification, political practice, and eventual failure of this project is an interesting, though extreme, historical example of difficulties embedded in a more universal ‘quest for the political form that would permit the gathering of the energies of the city while escaping the fate of the city’ (Manent 2013: 5).
Rohdewald, Stefan. Approaches to Polish-Lithuanian / Belarusian and Ukrainian History before 1800 in the Context of Local, Regional and Transregional Entanglements Approaches to Polish-Lithuanian / Belarusian and Ukrainian History before 1800 in the Context of Local, Regional and Transregional En..., 2022
In this short essay I explore the multilingual and multireligious character of the multi- national Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Early Modern period. This short piece is an outline of a prospective new approach drawing on a transregional and Transottoman perspective, influenced by the ongoing transnational turn in historiography.
Lithuanian Historical Studies, 2012
This article is a continuation of the analysis of the structure and extent of the foreign trade of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th to 18th centuries, the starting point of which is the problematic place of the concept of the capitalist world system (CWS) which has exaggerated too much the influence of international trade on the socioeconomic development of the Commonwealth. Having analysed Poland’s foreign trade structure in the 16th to 18th centuries, as well as the scale of its economic involvement in international trade, the article seeks to determine the foreign trade structure of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) in the 16th to 18th centuries, and the scale of its involvement in international trade. The article consists of two sections (The Integration of the GDL’s Foreign Trade in the 16th to 18th Centuries into European Market Relations: The Role of Sea Trade and its Growth; and The Foreign Trade of the GDL with the West in the 16th to 18th Centuries: Structur...