Could the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth have been rescued in the eighteenth century? If certain social strata had not been so excluded, might the partitions of Poland never have come to pass?

Who discussed Polish politics centuries ago, and how? What was the language of that discourse? What values did it invoke? What kind of state did it describe?

The Polish language in Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine has been researched from many points of view, but it needs further studying. New material is required: records, letters, diaries, treatises, especially for researching standard Polish of the 20th century in its regional variant spoken by magnats, middle nobility, petty nobility living in villages, and by inteligentsia of cities and small towns. Also there are needed new methodological approaches to studying essential features of Polish mentioned above, which will take into account the frequent (common) traits as well as relict ones. The examination of these features will create a good base for distinguishing separate areas of the Polish language in Lithuania and Belorussia. The characteristic of vocabulary requests confrontation of words among others in synonymic pairs: native and foreign ones in register and in text, preferably based on computer text corps. To ascertain code mixing (also to find the homogenous/mixed character of the texts) it is necessary to apply both a panchronic approach (which regards all foreign elements), and a synchronic one (leaving out those foreign elements, which entered the grammatical or lexical systems of Polish). The paper proposes some ways for solving these problems

The aim of the article is to present the attestations of contemporary Polish surnames of Lithuanian origin which are absent from the dictionary of Lithuanian surnames (“Lietuvių pavardžių žodynas”, LPŽ), excerpted from the anthroponymic index card files that have been stored in the Lithuanian Language Institute in Vilnius and continually enlarged for several decades now. The files contain data excerpted from historical sources of the 16th to 19th centuries and consist of about 200,000 index cards (the actual number of excerpted anthroponyms is lower since some recur in various sources). Due to space limitations, generally only directly attested names have been included in the article, to the exclusion of those whose relationship with the researched name can be inferred rather than considered proven. Each listed attestation of an anthroponym (probably not in all cases an already established hereditary surname) is accompanied by information concerning its location and year (or time bracket), wherever available in the card index file. Given names or other details (e.g. the role of the person mentioned in documents, such as godmother in the data excerpted from baptismal registers) have only been included occasionally, if there was some reason to do so.

The article presents the most frequent surname in Lithuania — Kazlauskas. Referring to the article “Mysterious Lewandowski” by K. Skowronek (2000), an attempt has been made to account for this frequency in three various ways. First, the principles behind the quantitative structure of anthroponomasticons (Zipf’s law) and the loss of surnames (genetic drift) are discussed. Then the Slavic origin of the surname under consideration has been highlighted as a typical trait of the majority of surnames in Lithuania. In connection with this fact, it has been stressed that caution must be exercised in proposing a thesis on its origin as a translation from Lithuanian on a mass scale, since this thesis requires plentiful empirical evidence. Finally, the etymology of the name is analyzed. Morphologically it is a typical surname derived from a toponym. This supposition is additionally supported by the existence in Poland of numerous localities called Kozłów, Kozłowo or similar name; these in turn are most likely to have been derived from appellative-based personal names of their owners or inhabitants, such as Kozieł.

Jerzy Topolski was one of the most outstanding Polish historians of the late 20th century. He wrote numerous works, including a synthesis of the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Com-monwealth in the 16-18th centuries, which is the object of the analyses presented in this article.

Western Ukraine arouses a high emotional charge of historical origin. There are a number of buildings and complexes in this area created since the 14th century, that are the witnesses of the Polish presence and our contribution to the culture of these lands. The monuments of sacred architecture and numerous military ones occupy a special place. In the short interwar period a number of structures and complexes that demonstrate a high level of design technique were created. Their current technical state is usually very bad. Our participation in restoring splendour to the witnesses of our, historical centuries-old presence, would be beneficial.

During the Russian-Polish negotiations at the end of 1671 – the beginning of 1672, several Russian memorandums were handed over to Polish-Lithuanian diplomats. All these original documents are preserved in the Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kórnik, Poland, and are studied as some of the most important forms of diplomatic communications between the Muscovite State and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The memorandums clearly reveal the Muscovite diplomatic tactic against the Polish-Lithuanian side. They focus on the main problems of Russian- Polish relationships such as the transfer of Kiev from Russia to Poland (which had to be fulfilled in 1669 but which has never been executed), the policy towards the right-bank Ukraine hetman Piotr Doroshenko, who pledged his allegiance to the Ottoman sultan, the attack of the left-bank Ukrainian Cossacks (who were under the Thar’s rule) on the Lithuanian borderlands, and the implementing of the previous Russian-Polish anti-Ottoman treaty of 1667. It can be supposed also that the diplomatic form of the memorandum itself was borrowed by the Russian Foreign Office from the Polish-Lithuanian diplomatic tradition.