„Entretiens” Stanisława Augusta z ambasadorem rosyjskim Ottonem Magnusem von Stackelbergiem i „Mémoires” ostatniego króla Rzeczypospolitej

Abstract

Entretiens of King Stanislaus Augustus with Russian ambassador Otto Magnus von Stackelberg, and Memoirs of the Commonwealth’s last king

Among the most important historical sources for the reign of Stanisław August one should list Entretiens abbreviated notices of Stanisław August’s talks with the Russian Ambassador Otto von Stackelberg. This article approaches the structure, the state of survival, the date of composition and the authorship of the Entretiens as well as their content and the nature of information included. The Entretiens, firstly conceived as short notes, evolved into more and more complex and specific reports, so the king could easily find every essential piece of information about Polish-Russian relations in one place.

Some of the talks recorded in the Entretiens were later included in King’s Memoirs, hence the second part of this article attempts at a comparison between the two. It reveals that the order of events described in Memoirs agrees with what we find in Entretiens, therefore we know that the latter was exploited during the composition of the Memoirs.

The author of the present study was lucky to have found among the documents reclaimed from Russia a clean copy of Entretiens from 1779, which allows us to hope that in Russian archives there are still even later the yearbooks, which supposedly might have helped the King in the work on other volumes of Memoirs. Moreover, the author’s intention was to suggest a method which would allow to evaluate reliability of the Memoirs. Owing to a partial comparative analysis of both sources one can conclude that the king wanted to protect his loved ones from being seen as anti-Russian and to avoid criticism of Catherine II. Stackelberg was the only one described exactly as how the king knew him. However, it does not undermine reliability of the Memoirs in general.