POLISH HUMANISM IN THE 16TH AND 17TH CENTURIES: A LOOK FROM MUSCOVY (Polskii gumanizm XVI-XVII v v.: vzglyad iz Moskovskoi Rusi)

This paper investigates the reception of Polish humanistic heritage in Russia within the period from the 17th century until the end of the first third of the 18th century. It is shown that during this time Russian translators were largely interested in the humanistic historiography (Maciej of Miechow, Marcin Bielski, Aleksander Gwanin, Marcin Kromer and others) as well as in the works on the theory of the state that were written during the Polish Renaissance (Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, Sebastian Petrycy, Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro and others). The very fact that these translations began to appear shortly before the reforms of Peter the Great is an important witness of a new climate in the Russian society of the time. This surge of interest for humanistic Polish sociology and philosophy of the state is not surprising: not only was Poland a geographically close powerful country, but it also was the only Slavic nation beside Russia that had not lost its political independence by that time. Its experience was therefore immediately relevant for the new Russian state and had to be considereded for the reforms. Among other questions that the present paper addresses are confessional and cultural differences that have affected the relations between Polish and Russian literaratures as well as the ratio between secular and clerical works in the translations. The latter is assessed from the perspective of orthodoxy and orthopraxy; in particular, the presence of Polish clerical literature among the works read by the Old Believers is used as case study.