Adam Kirkor and “Regional” Historiography in the Context of the Transformation of the Russian Empire in the 19th Century
Tatsiana Valodzina
Provincial historiography began to actively develop in Russia during the post-reform period. As shown in the work of V. Berdinskie, in the Great Russian provinces, interest in regional history had an undeniable connection with liberal-democratic ideas of the 1860s. The efforts of local historians began to form the notion of the significance of not only centralization but also decentralization. The essence of such regionalism lay in the conviction: Russia is not only Moscow and St. Petersburg, not only palaces and ministries, offices and headquarters; “We” are also Russia. This meant that Russian history could be studied not only from St. Petersburg but also from Vyatka, Ryazan, Nizhny Novgorod. The focus was on the development of “regions” and the self-activity of the people.
Outwardly similar, but fundamentally different processes can be seen in the activities of local historians and local lore enthusiasts in the national outskirts of the Russian Empire. Here, too, there was a growing interest in local history. But while Vyatka enthusiasts proved the thesis “We are also Russia” with their works, their colleagues from Vilnius, Riga, or Kyiv, who mostly shared the conviction “We are not Russia,” faced an even more complex question: “In that case, who are we?” The problem of interpreting the past in search of an answer to this question was particularly acute in the then North-Western region. The sharpness was determined, firstly, by the presence in Polish historiography of a developed tradition of “Jagiellonian Poland,” which linked the golden age of Polish history with the period of the 14th to the end of the 16th century and viewed the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in an inseparable connection with this history. Secondly, the factor of the uprisings of 1830-31 and 1863 gave archaeological finds, museum exhibits, and historical works the character of arguments that supported the historical correctness of the conflicting sides. All these considerations must be taken into account when examining the phenomenon of “regional” historiography.
Adam Kirkor
The word krajowy in Polish has two meanings: 1) domestic, local; 2) national, state-wide, all-Polish. Throughout the 19th century, one can note a certain drift in the self-consciousness of many natives of the Western provinces. This drift found, in particular, reflection in the divergence of the two meanings of the word. The semantic opposition of “local” and “all-Polish” reflected the difficult and painful process of the emergence of ideas about the identity of a vast territory from Smolensk to Białystok. By the beginning of the 20th century, the movement of “regionalists” had already begun to take shape ideologically and politically: in journalism, documents, and political party programs. In the eyes of those who perceived the “region” as something unique and distinct from both “Poland” and “Russia,” the primary task was to find the foundation on which they could build their “otherness.”
The task was not easy, as the strongest cultural influence came from both the West and the East. The classic of Belarusian literature, Yanka Kupala, in his tragicomedy “The Locals,” grotesquely depicted the claims of Russia and Poland on borderlands and provided a satirical embodiment of these claims in the images of the “Western scholar” and the “Eastern scholar.” The former wears a kontush and a confederate hat, walks with a shaved beard and drooping mustaches, while the latter is dressed in a “podziówka” and “kasavarotka,” with long boots on his feet and an unshaven, shaggy beard. They conduct research, ask local residents, and record legends. However, where the Eastern scholar notes in his diaries: “The nature in the Russian North-Western region is great and abundant,” the Western scholar remarks: “The nature in the Polish Eastern Borderlands is extraordinarily rich and plentiful.” The transformation of the ancient sea into the Pinsk marshes is explained by the first as “harmful climatic influences from the West,” while the second attributes it to “harmful influences from the East.” However, Yanka Kupala’s play was written in 1922, and by that time, it was already a phenomenon in the development of Belarusian national consciousness. In the 19th century, everything was different; the concept of “Belarusian-ness” was still far off, but the activity aimed at developing a viewpoint distinct from the positions of the “Western” and “Eastern” scholars had already begun, and its most important component was the study and interpretation of the region’s past. A significant contribution to this process was made by representatives of the Vilnius historical school.
Among the figures who played an active role in the development of the “regional” interpretation of the past, a notable place is occupied by Adam Honorat Kirkor (in Russian tradition, Adam Karlovich) — a well-known archaeologist, ethnographer, historian, and publisher. However, applying a definition that could be attributed to these nouns is not so simple. In contemporary Belarusian works, Kirkor is classified as a “Belarusian” scholar, Polish scholars consider him a “Pole,” while Lithuanian authors believe that Kirkor “was situated between Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus.”
Adam Kirkor was born in 1812 in the town of Slivino in the Mogilev province. Regarding his father’s social status, various opinions exist — a Uniate priest, a small landowner, or even a one-man estate. Kirkor received his education at the Mogilev gymnasium and the Vilnius Noble Institute. In the late 1830s, he settled in Vilnius, briefly served as secretary in the provincial administration. However, the bureaucratic path did not seem attractive to him, and soon he fully devoted himself to historical and ethnographic work and publishing. He became a member and later the secretary of the provincial statistical committee, actively collaborating with the Vilnius Archaeographic Commission. From 1855, when the museum of antiquities was established, Kirkor took the position of its curator. He widely expanded his publishing activities: from 1850 to 1854, he published the “Memorial Books of the Vilnius Province,” and from 1857 to 1863, the almanac “Teka Wileńska.” In 1859, he acquired his own printing house, and from 1860, he became the editor-publisher of the “Vilensky Vestnik.” These were the golden years of Adam Kirkor. In Vilnius, he interacted with like-minded individuals (Y. Tyshkevich, T. Narbut, N. Malinowski, I. Khodko, and others), who willingly offered their historical and literary works for his publications. Kirkor’s own works on history, archaeology, and ethnography were published not only in local publications; his articles appeared in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The “Vilensky Vestnik” transformed from a weak semi-official organ into an interesting magazine, and the number of its subscribers increased from 400 to 3000 people.
The uprising of 1863 put an end to all this. Kirkor himself did not join the insurgents, but it became clear that even with loyalty, he had turned into a persona non grata. Administrative correspondence preserved dramatic details of how he was “pushed out” of the publishing field. Forced, according to the order of M. Muravyov, to publish the “Vilensky Vestnik” in Russian and print all official messages and orders in it, Kirkor was effectively driven to bankruptcy. His printing house was seized, and the contract with him was unilaterally terminated. However, the bankrupt editor raised counterclaims. The authorities found themselves in a difficult position: legally, the case had to be examined in court, but the process would inevitably take on a political character — something like “Kirkor vs. Muravyov.” Ultimately, a compromise was reached: the “Vilensky Vestnik” received another editor, and Kirkor was granted freedom. He wrote to his friend A. Katlyarevsky: “On December 1 [1865], I will finally be freed from the editorship; I am completely ruined, I don’t know what to do.” Deciding to leave Vilnius, he hesitated between St. Petersburg and Moscow and asked Katlyarevsky for advice: “Do you think there will be work, or is there prejudice in known circles against a settler from Vilnius?”
The choice was made in favor of St. Petersburg, and in 1867, Kirkor moved to the northern capital. Here he took up the publication of the newspaper “Novoe Vremya.” One can assume that the permission for a new publication (which was not easy to obtain) was a kind of compensation for Kirkor for the losses incurred and the loyalty shown in Vilnius. But St. Petersburg did not bring him happiness. Kirkor devoted much attention in his newspaper to the problems of the Western region, which aroused suspicion from the censors and dissatisfaction from the Russian intelligentsia. In the eyes of the Poles, the editor of “Novoe Vremya” appeared to be a renegade.
Soon, a catastrophe occurred; in 1870, Kirkor was declared an insolvent debtor, and to escape from a debt prison, he was forced to leave Russia. Since then, Kirkor lived in Krakow, occasionally visiting Prague, Lviv, or Poznań. Old age was bitter. Kirkor made ends meet with occasional earnings: he wrote articles, received assistance from the Krakow Academy of Sciences, and conducted archaeological excavations in Galicia. And he mourned… Describing a circle of Vilnius friends and acquaintances from the late 1850s, Kirkor recalled: “Not long before the political storm and in the very midst of its terrible upheavals, sudden death snatched from our ranks the best people, as if wanting to spare them from misfortunes and grief.” And in a letter to Katlyarevsky, he confessed: “It’s bad, my dearest Alexander Alekseevich! Life is hard. Nothing can be done with the Lithuanian nature; I will be miserable everywhere except Vilnius. And the thought kills me that I will never again see my Lithuania, and I will have to lay my bones here, while I have such a good place reserved for me in Rosy.”
These cemeteries were dedicated by Kirkor in a whole chapter of his guide “Walks in Vilnius and Its Surroundings.” Graves and tombstones appeared to him as silent intermediaries between the past and the present. Kirkor wrote: “Walks along the Rosy are beneficial for the soul, for these cemeteries are a great book of life, before us unfolds a concise history of thousands of people… this philosophical treatise on the vanity of the earthly world compels us to think and feel more deeply.” But Kirkor was not destined to rest in the Vilnius cemeteries. He died in 1886 in Krakow, leaving his entire archive to the Krakow National Museum. Shortly before his death, he wrote to a friend: “Death does not frighten me; I have lived enough. I have done what I could according to my strength and means, and with a clear conscience, I can admit that my life has not been in vain for Lithuania.”
For Kirkor, “Lithuania” was not reduced to territory; this concept acquired the character of a value that gave meaning to his entire life. In 1861, he wrote to his beloved woman: “I am a Lithuanian; this feeling can never be destroyed in me. I love my homeland with all the inspiration of a youth, with all the self-denial of a husband. I feel sympathy for Poland to the extent that its fate is connected with ours.” But the concept of “Lithuanian” had a very special meaning for Kirkor; it differed from the meaning of “ethnic Lithuanian” (in Polish, litwyn) and at the same time was not reduced to the outdated meaning of this word, which was used in the 16th-17th centuries. Back then, in the late Middle Ages, Lithuanians referred to the population of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. For Kirkor, Adam Mickiewicz was, for example, a “Lithuanian”: “By birth, he belongs to the Belarusian Polesie, but by upbringing, by his early works, he belongs to Lithuania, which in the memories of his entire life, in all his works, merges with Belarus.” The Polish language, in which cultural and scientific figures wrote, from Kirkor’s point of view, was not an obstacle to “Lithuanian-ness,” for what mattered was not so much the language as the feelings expressed in it — feelings for the land on which one grew up, for its past and present. About the famous writer, he wrote, in particular: “Ignat Khodko is, in the full sense of the word, a Lithuanian. Lithuania is alive in him in every way; with ease and a certain special warmth, he paints the domestic life, rituals, customs, or suddenly resurrects in memory long-past deeds, legends, showing historical figures.”
Thus, “Lithuanian-ness” was not about blood or ethnic affiliation; it was formed in consciousness. History served as a powerful tool in this regard; it could successfully solve the task of constructing the image of Lithuania as an “ideal homeland.” And it is not accidental, perhaps, that throughout his life, Kirkor was particularly inclined to historical works. As secretary of the Vilnius provincial statistical committee, Kirkor took on the publication of the “Memorial Books of the Vilnius Province.” As a result, standard reference books and address-calendars transformed into the most interesting publications, which included materials from historical, archaeological, and ethnographic research; they even caught attention in the capital. These materials Kirkor grouped separately from the reference part and considered them a kind of “appendices” to the “Memorial Books…” It is worth noting that in his historical articles, Kirkor sought to provide references and show the sources he used as much as possible, which attests to his sufficiently high scientific level.
To this group of works belong Kirkor’s articles on the history, archaeology, and ethnography in other scientific journals, as well as publications of the Vilnius Archaeological Commission prepared with his participation. However, Kirkor sought to reach beyond the narrow circle of antiquity and archaeology enthusiasts and to captivate a wide audience with the past of Lithuania. In the periodicals he published during those years (“Vilensky Vestnik” and “Teka Wileńska”), historical themes also occupied a central place. It is not accidental that the guide to Vilnius survived four editions in a short time; in an engaging form, it acquainted readers with the memorable places of the city. Kirkor named this book “Walks in Vilnius.” Indeed, while reading it, one gets the impression that, moving leisurely through the streets of the city, a good acquaintance is telling you about the churches and cemeteries, the town halls and private houses, and the public buildings. But most importantly, he recounts the events that once took place on these streets, about the people who lived in these houses. One of the “walks,” by the way, was specifically dedicated to the exhibits of Kirkor’s beloved museum of antiquities.
The St. Petersburg period was not as rich in historical works, although on the pages of “Novoe Vremya,” one could find materials dedicated to the history of the North-Western region. However, in Krakow, Kirkor returned to his favorite themes. It was difficult to work, as he had lost his entire library, and not all Russian scientific publications could be found there. The salary was small and unstable. Nevertheless, Kirkor published both small memoir articles and reports on his archaeological excavations in southern Galicia, as well as popular essays on Russian literature or Lithuanian antiquities. Among the most significant works of the Krakow period, it is worth mentioning the book on the literature of the Slavic peoples, which became the result of a course of public lectures. Kirkor himself wrote: “I risked something terribly strange here, which terrified many! Namely — I announced public lectures on the fraternal literatures of the Slavs. The matter seemed almost incredible, yet it ended in success.” A beneficial distraction amid life’s hardships was also the work on the third volume of “Picturesque Russia,” dedicated to Lithuania and Belarus. This grand publication, conceived and implemented by M. Wolf, required the combined efforts of the best representatives of Russian science and literature. Kirkor, a lonely emigrant and failure, was invited to participate in this work, and such an invitation was of great value. This recognized his merits in the study of Lithuania.
We can highlight the main provisions of Kirkor’s concept regarding the past of Lithuania. In a concise graphic form, Kirkor himself tried to do this back in the 1850s when at the beginning of his book he placed a vignette specially commissioned for this purpose from the artist Vincent Dmohovsky. At the center of the vignette is an oak, the sacred tree of the ancient Lithuanians. At the bottom, the supreme god of the pagan pantheon Perun stands on an ancient stone altar. Kirkor narrates where and when axes and hatchets, women’s hairpins and beads, idols, and household utensils were found during excavations. Under the oak sits an armed warrior, and between the portraits is the monogram of Vytautas — AW (Alexander-Vytautas). The portraits depict Prince Vytautas and Barbara Radziwiłł. In the center of the vignette are historical sites: the Lidzk Castle, the Bernardine Tower in Vilnius, the castle in Medniki, the Castle Hill in Vilnius, the ruins of the palace of Barbara Radziwiłł, the Trotsky and Krewo castles, the Piatnitskaya Church, and St. Nicholas Church in Vilnius.
In the entire complex of Kirkor’s historical works, one can identify common features characteristic of his interpretation of the history of Lithuania — that “ideal homeland” which he sought to find not only in the present but also in the past. By the way, many of his works were signed with the pseudonym Jan from Slivino. This mention of the town where Kirkor was born is far from accidental. Another representative of the Vilnius historians, I. Anacevich, also liked to sign as Zhegota from Brzastovits. There was a certain cultural code hidden behind this. Firstly, the code referred to the romantic literary tradition. Julian Niemcewicz, for example, wrote the historical novel “Jan from Tenczyn,” and Jan Khodko — “Pan Jan from Swisłocz.” Secondly, the code allowed historians to position themselves as people rooted precisely in this land. They had no state that coincided with the image of the ideal homeland; they could not feel like “historiographers” like Karamzin or Narushevich (Adam Narushevich wrote a multi-volume “History of the Polish Nation” at the behest of King Stanislaus Augustus). But they could emphasize their status as private individuals who viewed the history of their homeland not from St. Petersburg or Warsaw, but from the perspective of the “region.”
Kirkor was very interested in archaeology throughout his life. Skeletons and objects from ancient burial mounds seemed to him impartial witnesses, free from political, national, or religious bias. Attempts to use archaeology for such purposes were sincerely rejected by Kirkor. From Krakow, he wrote: “It is also funny that the local pious people intertwine religion with archaeology. When it comes to the primitive man, then the puzzle!” Archaeology, in Kirkor’s opinion, irrefutably proved that the Slavs and Lithuanians were the indigenous population of the lands now called the Western region. It was they — Rus and Lithuania — that organically united to create this single “region” with its unique history and culture. Kirkor even saw a direct genealogical link between the Gediminids and the Polotsk princes. But indigenous tribes easily absorbed and assimilated foreign culture (Scandinavian axes on the vignette). As a result of the mixing of different languages, ethnicities, and confessions (including Polish and Jewish components), a synthesis occurred, and “Lithuania” was formed.
Its golden age fell in the 14th to 16th centuries, especially during the reign of Vytautas, when “Lithuania, … which feared neither Poland nor Eastern Rus nor the Tatars, resembled a strong, brave, receptive youth, who has everything except maturity and experience.” It is not surprising that in the vignette, among the depicted buildings, only structures from the 14th to 16th centuries are shown; later monuments probably seemed to Kirkor less “Lithuanian.” In the 13th century, Kirkor believed, Lithuania saved Europe from the horrors of the Mongol invasion with its courage, as Mindaugas defeated the Mongolian armies in 1242 and 1249.
The syncretism of culture led to the formation of tolerance in society. Kirkor assessed ethnic and religious tolerance, characteristic of Lithuania, as undeniable achievements, where laws protected Orthodox and Catholics, Tatars, Karaites, and Jews. In this context, Kirkor’s calm attitude towards Vytautas, raised by a pagan priestess and who changed his faith three times, seems entirely natural.
The question of Polish influence was a difficult and even painful one for Kirkor. On the one hand, as a historian and archaeologist, he knew that Poles — Poles by blood and origin, descendants from true Poland — were few in Lithuania. But it was impossible to distance oneself from the fact that Polish culture had deeply penetrated the flesh and blood of the local educated population: “When many Belarusians and Lithuanians adopted Polish nationality, the Polish language, and in many ways (though not in all) Polish morals and customs, and finally, when they themselves call themselves Poles, then not only from an ethnographic but also from a moral point of view, we have no right to call them otherwise.”
On the other hand, Kirkor considered the rapprochement of Lithuania and Poland, which began in the 15th century, artificial — “a strained friendship with contradictions, misunderstandings, and distrust.” He called the Union of 1569 a political death and characterized the period from 1569 to 1795 as “a series of disasters and moral violence that led to moral corruption and then to downfall.” It is not surprising that in the vignette next to the portrait of Vytautas, Kirkor placed the image of Barbara Radziwiłł — this tragic figure of Lithuanian history of the 16th century. King Sigismund Augustus, passionately in love, married her, but Polish society received the Lithuanian princess with hostility, and she soon died of poison. Behind this symbol lies a completely natural need for “regional” historiography — to divide Lithuania and Poland.
Kirkor more decisively drew a waterline between Rus and Russia. The history of Russia, for him, began with the Moscow state, while Rus was the world unfolding in the chronicle of Nestor and in “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” Rus, which organically entered Lithuania, includes the principalities of Polotsk, Minsk, Vitebsk, Slutsk, Drućk, Turaŭ, Orsha, and others. It is here in the 10th to 13th centuries that the veche tradition manifests itself as a characteristic feature of the political development of Rus, in contrast to the despotic tendencies of Moscow Russia. It was much easier for Kirkor to include Volhynia, Podolia, and Galicia in “Rus” than Vladimir and Tver.
This principle of separating Rus and Russia was particularly clearly manifested in his work on the development of Slavic literatures, in which separate chapters were dedicated to Ruthenian, Russian, Czech-Moravian, Lusatian, Serbian, and Bulgarian literature. In the sections on Ruthenian literature, Kirkor continued the thread of development from Nestor to “Rus’ Truth” — through the works of Peter Skarga and Metropolitan Mohyla — to the creativity of Władysław Syrokomla, Mykola Kostamarov, and Taras Shevchenko. Russian literature, for him, began with Maxim the Greek and ended with Nekrasov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. This was a fully conscious position; Kirkor himself confessed in a letter: “Surely, the Russian will not like that I draw a sharp line between Eastern and Western Russia and speak first about the latter, i.e., about Ruthenian literature (Little Russian and Belarusian), and about Russian or Muscovite literature — starting from the 15th and 16th centuries. But what can I do? Kyiv, the songs about Igor’s campaign, Skaryna, the Statutes, etc., I will not give to the Muscovites. All this is ours, while their literature actually begins with the times of Grozny, Kurbsky, and others.”
We believe that one can view the work of Adam Kirkor as one of the manifestations of the initial stage of forming a special interpretation of the history of the Russo-Polish civilizational border. It cannot be considered “national” in the sense of belonging to the Belarusian, Lithuanian, or Ukrainian historiographical tradition. But it contained seeds of all three. Its national character, if you will, lay in the project of constructing a “Lithuanian” nation. It is difficult to assess the chances of its realization unequivocally. But in the very phenomenon of “regional” historiography, the process of growing contradictions between national and imperial beginnings found reflection. The paths of developing national consciousness are generally very intricate. In 2000, for example, in Novogrudok, the Act of declaring the existence of a “Lithuanian nation” was signed. In Belarusian media, this event appeared as an action of a marginal group of schizoids, so small that they all fit into one bus. It seems that such an act of “founding” a nation serves as a vivid illustration of the extreme and absurd constructivist approach to understanding the essence of a nation. The weakness of such an approach is demonstrated by E. Hobsbawm, providing a hypothetical example with the Isle of Wight; from the point of view of a subjective understanding of nationalism, to create a “Wightian” nation, it is enough for a certain group of people to start considering themselves as such. However, let us not forget that in 1903, when members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia traveled to Poltava for the unveiling of a monument to Katlyarevsky, they all fit into a couple of train cars. The passengers themselves even joked that if the train were to derail somewhere along the way, Ukraine would cease to exist.
In general, the path of forming national consciousness is full of unexpected turns, new possibilities, and alternatives, so to imagine it as something linear, inevitable, and rigidly determined can only be done if development is viewed from the perspective of our current knowledge about the achieved results, a posteriori. In the second half of the 19th century, for example, the impulse to construct a special identity was present in the ideas of Ukrainophiles, Provençal poets, Vilnius “regionalists,” and Siberian provincialists. Today, a century and a half later, we know that only the Ukrainophiles achieved their goals. But do we have the right to leave our knowledge in the past? Do we have the right to simplify the real complexity of historical development and emphasize in the past only what works to prove the known result today? However, in striving to understand the alternatives of these processes, one must not fall into the other extreme — reducing them solely to historical contingency.
[1] Berdinskie V. Provincial Historians: Russian Provincial Historiography. Moscow: NLO, 2003. P. 28-44.
[2] Kupala Y. Plays. Journalism. Yanka Kupala about Himself. Minsk, 2002. P. 287.
[3] See: Smolenchuk A.F. Historical Consciousness and the Ideology of the Poles of Belarus and Lithuania in the Early 20th Century // Slavic Studies. 1997. No. 5. P. 100-105.
[4] See, for example: Karev D. Belarusian Historiography from the Late 18th to the Early 20th Century // Our Genealogy. Grodno, 1993. Vol. 5. Part 2. P. 307-308; Bazylev L. Poles in St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg, 2003. P. 170-172; Medišauskiené Z. Adam Honory Kirkor — Between Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus // Lituano-Slavica Posnaniensia. Historical Studies VIII. Edition I.
[5] On this, see: Memorandum of the Special Office of the Chief Administrator of the North-Western Provinces on the case of the former editor of the “Vilensky Vestnik” A.K. Kirkor. RGIA. F. 954. Op. 1. D. 105.
[6] OR RNB. F. 386. D. 52. P. 1 ob.
[7] Ibid. P. 4.
[8] Kirkor A. From the Memories of Vilnius // Kraj. 1884. No. 3.
[9] OR RNB. F. 386. D. 52. P. 28.
[10] Kirkor A. Walks in Vilnius and Its Surroundings. Vilnius, 1859. P. 241.
[11] Quoted in: Yanchuk N.A. A.K. Kirkor. A Brief Outline of Life and Activity. Moscow, 1888. P. 28.
[12] The conversation is about Maria Bachkowska; they could only marry in August 1866, and Kirkor wrote about this: “I fought with the priests for six years and finally prevailed.” See: OR RNB. F. 386. D. 52. P. 12.
[13] Quoted in: Telivirskaia E.Y. Some Issues of the Public Movement in Lithuania and Belarus in the Late 50s — Early 60s and Underground Literature // Revolutionary Russia and Revolutionary Poland. The Second Half of the 19th Century. Moscow, 1967. P. 18.
[14] Picturesque Russia. Vol. 3. St. Petersburg, 1882. P. 124.
[15] Ibid. P. 127.
[16] On the image of the “ideal homeland” as a complex ideological construct arising in the process of modeling a nation, see: Miller A.I. The Ukrainian Question in the Politics of the Authorities and Russian Public Opinion (the Second Half of the 19th Century). St. Petersburg, 2000. P. 12.
[17] On this, see: Levin D.E. The First Capital Reviews of the Memorial Books of the Vilnius Province (1852-1854) // Belarusian Collection. Vol. 1. St. Petersburg, 1998. P. 41-62.
[18] Among similar works by Kirkor, one can mention “Chronological Account of Notable Events in National History in the Vilnius Province up to 1852” (PBVG for 1851 and 1852); “Essays on the Cities of the Vilnius Province” (PBVG for 1852); “Statistical View of the Vilnius Province” (PBVG for 1853); “Lithuanian Antiquities” (PBVG for 1854); “Vilnius Memories” (PBVG for 1853); “Grand Duke Vytautas” (PBVG for 1854); “Traits from the History and Life of the Lithuanian People” (PBVG for 1854).
[19] Kirkor A. Ethnographic View of the Vilnius Province // Bulletin of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Part XX, XXI. St. Petersburg, 1857-1858; Notes of the Imperial Archaeological Society. Vol. VIII. St. Petersburg, 1856; News of the Imperial Archaeological Society. St. Petersburg, 1857. Vol. 1. Issue 1; “Antiquities”. Proceedings of the Moscow Archaeological Society. Vol. 1. Issue 2. Moscow, 1867; Notes of the Vilnius Temporary Archaeological Commission. Issue 1. Vilnius, 1856; Issue 3. Vilnius, 1858; Catalog of Items in the Vilnius Museum of Antiquities. Vilnius, 1858; In Memory of the Stay of His Imperial Majesty Alexander II in Vilnius on September 6 and 7, 1858. Album published by the Vilnius Archaeological Commission. Vilnius, 1858.
[20] Kirkor A. The Slavs of the Baltic Sea. Ethnological and Mythological Outlines. Lviv, 1876; Kirkor A. On the Importance and Significance of Primitive Monuments and Their Skillful Search: (two public lectures at the Technical and Industrial Museum in Krakow) / by A.H. Kirkor. Krakow, 1878; Kirkor A. Where the Remains of Stanisław Leszczyński Rest / by A.H. Kirkor. Krakow, 1884; Kirkor A. The Lithuanian Basilica. Krakow: Ed. “Przegląd Powszechny,” 1886; Kirkor A. Archaeological Research. Krakow, 1879; Kirkor A. B.M. Wolff: Posthumous Remembrance. St. Petersburg, 1884; Kirkor A. Outlines of Contemporary Russian Literature. Poznań, 1873.
[21] Kirkor A. On the Literature of Fraternal Slavic Nations. Krakow, 1874.
[22] OR RNB. F. 386. D. 52. P. 28.
[23] See: Kirkor A., Kukolnik P. Traits from the History and Life of the Lithuanian People. Vilnius, 1853. P. 7-20.
[24] OR RNB. F. 386. D. 52. P. 26.
[25] See: Picturesque Russia. Vol. 3. P. 293.
[26] Kirkor A., Kukolnik P. Traits from the History and Life of the Lithuanian People. P. 22.
[27] See: Picturesque Russia. P. 75-76.
[28] See: Kirkor A., Kukolnik P. Traits from the History and Life of the Lithuanian People. P. 45.
[29] Picturesque Russia. Vol. 3. P. 11.
[30] Ibid. P. 91.
[31] See: Ibid. P. 291-295.
[32] OR RNB. F. 386. D. 52. P. 30.
[33] See: Satsuk S. We are not Scythians, not Asians… // Belarusian Business Newspaper. No. 774 from 27.05.2000.
[34] See: Hobsbawm E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge University Press, 1990. P. 8.
[35] See: Miller A.I. Op. cit. P. 231.
Belarusian Historical Review. Volume 12. Issues 1-2 (22-23).