Abstract

The Lost Academic Legacy of Ignacy Daniłowicz

Summary

Ignacy Daniłowicz occupies a special place among Polish law historians of the first half of the nineteenth century. This profesor of Vilnius, and then Kharkov, Kiev, and Moscow Universities, an expert on Lithuanian and Russian law, the discoverer and publisher of invaluable sources, codifier of municipal law, and translator and bibliographer of the Statutes of Lithuania, fully deserves the admiration of his contemporaries and the memory of posterity. The fate of Daniłowicz’s manuscript legacy is not known. In particular, it is unknown whether the scholar really left an extensive manuscript on the history of Lithuania, as certain sources would seem to suggest. There is no doubt that Daniłowicz lost some of his manuscripts when moving from Moscow to Kiev. After Daniłowicz’s death, the Russian historian Mikhail P. Pogodin was interested in the acquisition of his surviving papers, but his efforts proved unsuccessful. Some of Daniłowicz’s manuscripts had come into the hands of the Polish researchers and collectors Eustachy Tyszkiewicz and Konstanty Świdziński. One example is a document from 1846 preserved among Mikołaj Malinowski’s papers in the Kórnicka Library. Malinowski apparently mediated in the transfer of the Daniłowicz legacy between Świdziński and Tyszkiewicz. The materials submitted to Tyszkiewicz are kept in eight files and cover a total of several hundred pages, and are probably the basis for the publication a few years after Daniłowicz’s death of the famous “Diplomats’ Treasury”.