THE KING WHO RISES AND REPENTS (TWO HYPOSTASES OF JAN III SOBIESKI IN THE REPORTS OF A RUSSIAN DIPLOMAT)

Abstract

The Age of Louis XIV is characterized by the pomp and splendor of court ceremonial, which had the goal, among other things, to exalt the figure of the sovereign. But in different traditions, not everything was so clear. This paper examines two seemingly mutually exclusive characteristics of the king of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, Jan III Sobieski. In the Russian translation of records from the reports of the Moscow permanent embassy in Warsaw, the image of the monarch is combined with the exploits of the crusaders. The passage clarifies some aspects of the political propaganda of the epoch of Jan III, makes it possible to better imagine the folding of his image as a knight of the new crusades against the Muslim Turks. The reference to the crusaders also fills in some gaps in the awareness of some Russians-intellectuals, representatives of high society, about the history of the Crusader movement. Another case studied in the article is not the heroic side of the king, a penitent sinner who begs for forgiveness for a crime of the legendary past. Here a phrase is analyzed, which in the Russian translation of the novel by the popular Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski "Narrenturm" was rendered as "pal krestom na pol". This is not the first appearance of the expression in Russian - we notice something similar in the notes of the Russian resident in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The author of the article tries to reveal the "semantic levels" of an unusual phrase, to discover the relationship between the utterance and the cultural and political situation in Rzeczpospolita of the XVII century.