SOURCE FOR THE BIOGRAPHY OF JULIUSZ SŁOWACKI: THE COURT CASE OF ERAZM SŁOWACKI
Authors:   Taras Shevchenko national University of Kyiv, Korotkyi Viktor 
Published: June 2023

Archives, museums and libraries of Ukraine preserve a large number of various documentary evidences dedicated to the Polish community and its existence on Ukrainian territory, as well as to the life and activities of its individual representatives. The informational potential of these materials is still not fully utilized due to the lack of a comprehensive index with a list of relevant documents and their storage locations in Ukrainian repositories. Increased public interest in iconic figures of Polish history and culture, whose lives were connected with Ukraine, stimulates searches in Ukrainian archives by domestic and foreign scientists. The article analyzes the course of the long-term land court case between the landowner Erazm Słowacki, the uncle of the classic of Polish literature, Juliusz Słowacki, with the Zhytomyr city society, which lasted almost three decades. The documents discovered in the State Archives of the Zhytomyr region reproduce the course of complex and contradictory processes that took place on the territory of Right Bank Ukraine after its capture by the Russian Empire. The author carried out an abstract review of a protracted court case involving the landowner (gentleman) E. Słowacki, who alternately sued the Zhytomyr city society and the magistrate, and later the Zhytomyr Duma, for the right to own land located on the outskirts of the city. These institutions protected the interests of the townspeople and did not want to recognize the legal ownership of the land bought by E. Słowacki from the previous owners. In fact, the analyzed conflict had a much deeper basis, and the struggle for land in Right Bank Ukraine was a competition of social structures and political ideologies, which will become obvious a little later. The representatives of the Polish community of the annexed regions of the Right Bank, finding themselves in a difficult situation, looked for ways to preserve their private property, but as evidenced by the archive file of E. Słowacki, they did not always manage to do this. An appeal to the highest judicial institutions of the Romanov empire, and even to Tsar Nicholas I himself, did not protect the property interests of the Słowacki’s. The heirs of E. Słowacki, after many years of litigation, lost a significant part of the lands of their ancestors, which generally corresponded to the colonization policy of the Russian Empire regarding the deprivation of land ownership of the Polish population of Right Bank Ukraine. The land ownership of the Polish elite of Right-Bank Ukraine and the profits it brought to its owners became the strongest economic basis that enabled Polish resistance to the colonial policy of the Russian Empire in this region. Unfortunately, the Polish community was not homogeneous and consolidated in its political aspirations. Part of the Polish elite sided with Russia. Others were forced to see the Russian tsars as defenders of their, if not political, then at least economic interests, dedicating their historical and poetic works to the Russian rulers. Among them was E. Słowacki, who dedicated a poem to Alexander I. However, the question of political loyalty of J. Słowacki’s uncle needs additional study as part of a complex and ambiguously interpreted phenomenon.