The Grand Duchy of Lithuania as Reflected in the Russian Historiography

Abstract

The paper deals with the image of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Russian historiography and traces its evolution from the early 19th century to the present. The author assumes that the main feature, characteristic of the Russian historical discourse of the GDL, lies in efforts to inscribe the GDL history into the Russian national narrative. The most notorious attempts to present the GDL as a „true Russian land” followed the suppression of uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863–1864, but due to their rude and unskillful forms (Nikolai G. Ustrialov and Mikhail O. Koialovich, respectively) they had nothing to do with scholarship.
During the imperial period, the academic discourse of the GDL passed two different phases: in 1860s though 1880s, the debate on „native and alien principles” underlying the law, state order, and culture of the Grand Duchy, echoed the ideas of Romantic German school of legal history.
Later on, at the turn of the 19th century, the Russian historiography entered a new, positivistic stage marked by extensive use of documentary sources and special attention to socio-economic issues in history. The last decades before the revolution of 1917 saw the appearance of standard works on the GDL history written by Matvei K. Liubavskii, Mitrofan V. Dovnar-Zapol’skii, Vladimir I. Picheta and other prominent scholars.
After the collapse of the Russian empire, the academic discourse of the GDL broke into national pieces. During the Soviet period Russian scholars paid little attention to the GDL history. In the 1980s and 1990s, there arose some interest to it but only in conjunction with Russian national history. In author’s view, the progress of the GDL historical studies depends on international efforts aimed at overcoming the national paradigm of historical writing and introducing new approaches and concepts.