Jan Baudouin de Courtenay in tsarist prison

Mateusz Kowalski

Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw

Abstract

The subject of the submitted article was a high-profile court case against the Polish linguist and columnist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay for publishing in 1913 the brochure Natsional’nyi I territorial’nyi priznak v avtonomii. Only few works have been published that fully and thoroughly expose this event from the life of a Polish-Russian scholar. The source material that I collected and developed allowed me to present the lawsuit, the trial and imprisoment of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay from the perspective of his family life (which is a novelty in previous studies). The analyzed research material consisted primarily of private documents of the Baudouin de Courtenay family, most importantly so called „Diary for the family” by Romualda Baudouin de Courtenay (the manuscript is in the Archives of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw) and letters from Jan Baudouin de Courtenay to other Polish linguists. The source material also allowed me to sketch the socio-cultural background of the era, showing the activity of the St. Petersburg Polonia on the eve of the outbreak of the First War and in its first year.

Keywords:

Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, censorship, journalism, national autonomy, lawsuit, Polish diaspora, World War I