RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT’S PROJECT OF TRANSLATION OF THE LITHUANIAN STATUTE INTO RUSSIAN AND ITS PUBLICATION IN 1811

Abstract

The article aims to answer how and why the Lithuanian Statute was translated into Russian in the first decade of the 19th century. The Statute of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, also widely known as the Lithuanian Statute, remained one of the major sources of valid law in the new provinces of the Russian Empire, received after the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Legal proceedings in the local courts of these provinces were conducted mostly in Polish, only appeal cases that were submitted to the Senate had to be translated into Russian. Therefore, the publication of the Russian translation of the Statute was important for practical purposes. It was aimed primarily at Russian-speaking imperial administrators in the provinces, as well as in St. Petersburg. The Commission for the Compilation of Laws set up in St. Petersburg played the key role in the project, particularly a team led by a legal scholar Adam Powstański. The project under investigation had a strong interconnection with Russia’s external affairs after the peace treaty of Tilsit. The foundation of the Duchy of Warsaw raised new hopes for an imminent re-creation of a sovereign Polish state and intensified rivalry between Napoleon and Alexander I for Polish sympathies. As Russian-French tensions rose, Alexander I deliberated over providing autonomous status to the western provinces. The discontent of the Warsaw elites following the introduction of the Napoleon Code in the Duchy gave Alexander I a good reason to publish the Statute in two languages as a signal to his Polish subjects about the future positive changes in their status.