Self-Representations of Polish Subjects in the Courts of the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland, 1813-1818

• In Event: Forging Frontiers: Identity, Representation, and Alienation in Imperial Russia's Borderlands

Abstract

In 1813, after defeating Napoleon, the Russian imperial army established control over a large territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and incorporated millions of new subjects. As recent historiography has suggested, Czar Alexander I considered his Polish subjects as a vital source of support for his liberal reform plans, and he gained knowledge about them through his visits to Warsaw where they met with him in person and petitioned him asking for aid with their private affairs. In this paper I examine how courts became sites where subjects strategically employed representations of the Polish society and the various social groups comprising it, in order to achieve Alexander’s intervention in their private affairs. I study the high-profile legal affair that began with the petition of General Józef Rautenstrauch accusing judge Mikołai Krzywiec-Okołowicz and several other judicial authorities of corruption. The litigants tried to exploit existing social divisions in Polish society in order to fashion themselves as loyal subjects and discredit their opponents as usurious bankers, opportunistic debtors, corrupt judges, and greedy heirs. The analysis of such strategic representations allows us to dissect the notion of the “Polish subject” in the Russian Empire and shed light on the performance of subjecthood in Russian-occupied Poland.

Author

• Kostas Zivas, Yale U