THIS BOOK COMPRISES forty letters written between January and September 1805 by one of Poland's greatest statesmen, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (1770-1861), Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Russian Imperial Government of Alexander I (after the Third Partition of Poland in 1795).

Directed to administrators and academics associated with the University of Vilna (the most progressive university in the Russian empire at the time), the letters deal with varied concerns -- political, cultural and administrative -- which defined Czartoryski's role in 1805 as Kurator of Education for the Vilna Region.

His reforms in this vast sector of the former Polish republic served to stimulate a national revival and encourage a vigorous Romantic sensibility in the arts.

The letters, consigned to a diary and housed in the Onacewicz Collection of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St-Petersburg, provide valuable information relating to Czartoryski's innovations in Polish education during the early post-partition years.

The letters are presented here for the first time in their original languages (Polish, French, German) in both their original transcription and a modernised version; the latter is accompanied by an English translation on facing pages.

THE ONACEWICZ COLLECTION is extremely valuable.  Many of the documents are simply unknown to scholars, as they have been out of circulation for the past century and a half.  These materials will undoubtedly be a valuable source of information on Polish and Lithuanian cultural history of the 17th-19th centuries.
 
 

From the Editor's Preface

THE PRESENT WORK is the first volume of the 'Poland' series to be published by the SLAVIC RESEARCH GROUP at the University of Ottawa.  ...the book provides new material on an important moment in Polish cultural history, the confrontation with post-partition reality. 
   The work also represents a co-operative effort of the GROUP and the INSTITUT RUSSKOJ LITERATURY [Institute of Russian Literature] of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St-Petersburg, the co-publishers of this volume.
 
 

From Czartoryski's letter to Prof. J«drzej åniadecki, 14 June 1805

NO FOREIGN PROFESSORS are being sought for posts which are being commendably and effectively occupied by Poles.  ...  I share the desire you express in your letter to see education spread rapidly among our compatriots, but our views on the means to accomplish that end are widely divergent.  In your view, it seems, it is more advantageous to engage a native-born teacher with mediocre talent, that this is preferable to hiring the most qualified foreigner; my own feeling is that if one wishes knowledge, one must study -- and if one wishes to be a good teacher, one must have good knowledge.  To not pursue fully qualified instructors from abroad in areas where eqully qualified instructors cannot be found at home, would be to condemn education to eternal mediocrity, to abandon any hope that our own countrymen might eventually become fully qualified instructors themselves.
 
 

Click on the links below to see other volumes in the Poland Series
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Poland Series -- Volume I	Adam Jerzy Czartoryski: Letters to Vilna 1805 Listy do Wilna
Poland Series -- Volume II	Wspomnienie o Januszu Rózewiczu Janusz Rózewicz: a reminiscence
Poland Series -- Volume III	Pan Sedzia Deluty

  

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