Authors

Anastasiia Lystsova¹;  ¹ Princeton University, Latvia

Discussion

When, in 1787, the Polish King Stanisław August Poniatowski came to Kaniv to meet the Russian empress, Catherine II, he actively supported the correspondence with other courtiers and diplomats. These letters, hundreds of which were published, contain detailed descriptions of the political and social environment observed by the king. 1787 was the year, preceded only a few years before the second and the third partitions of Poland-Lithuania, but at that moment meeting in Kaniv was distant from those events. Poniatowski, being a patriot of his country was trying to balance his policy through informal contacts with Saint-Petersburg which penetrated the social matrix of the two courts and at the same time connected them tightly. Through the examination of Poniatowski’s correspondence with Catherine II, Antoni Augustyn Deboli, Karl Heinrich von Nassau-Siegen, etc., this paper reconstructs the complexity of informal social networks which Warsaw maintained with Saint-Petersburg before the partitions. While the diplomatic relationships which existed between the two countries are very well studied, less attention was paid to the informal side of the social dynamic between courts which preceded the events of 1793 and 1795. This paper is a part of the bigger project which aims to reconstruct the informal relationships between Poland-Lithuania and the Russian Empire in the 18th century.