Polish Notes on Moscow Documents of the Time of Troubles: Historical and Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

Introduction. The article analyzes Polish markings made on documents of Moscow origin during the Time of Troubles. Materials. For analysis we took documents stored in the archives of St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (petitions of nobles, merchants and peasants to Moscow princes, King Sigismund III and Prince Vladislav), as well as documents from the Smolensk archive, which are located in the State Archives of Sweden (Riksarkivet). Two categories of documents stand out: petitions of Moscow nobles addressed to King Sigismund III and Prince Vladislav, as well as other documents that fell into the hands of the Poles after the fall of Smolensk in 1611. We included in the last category the documents of Smolensk Provincial Prikaz and the personal archive of voevoda M.B. Shein as well. After a long stay in the territory of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, a part of The Smolensk Archive came to Sweden during the Polish-Swedish war (the “Flood”), a part settled in the continental Europe, later re-entered the territory of Russia due to the activities of the Archaeographic Commission. Methods. We used the methods of comparative linguistic analysis, the method of comparison, the system method, as well as the narrative and historical-genetic methods. Results. Polish inscriptions on documents of Moscow origin testify to the great influence of the Russian language on Polish and the appearance of numerous Russisms in the Polish language.