A Political Moral Fable

That the Polish language and Polish culture exerted influence far beyond the limits of Polish ethnographic territory is a long established truism for which a survey of authors and works published in the Rzeczpospolita wielu narodów provides abundant evidence. Whether Orthodox or Protestant, Roman or Eastern-rite Catholic, Bela-rusian and Ukrainian citizens of this very large multinational state often were intimately familiar with Polish religious and secular literature of the Renaissance and Baroque. They made use of Polish literary models and the Polish language in both serious writing directed at the literate public as well as in their intimate private correspondence1. Perhaps the most illustrative figure of this phenomenon is Simiaon Polacki (1629-1680). Born Samuel Sitnianowicz-Piotrowski (Samuil Sitianovič-Pjatroŭski) in Polack into a Belarusian burgher family of mixed religious allegiance, the future poet and courtier acquired a thorough knowledge of Polish and Polish religious and secular culture as a result of his education at the feet of Orthodox instructors at the Collegium Mohyleanum in Kyjiv and under Jesuit tutelage at the Academia in Vilnius or at their collegium in his native city2. Scholarship long has pointed out the influence of Polish literature in his formation, in his personal library, and in his literary praxis3. The writer of these lines has recently published some of Polacki’s surviving correspon-1 Martel 1938 remains the classic study of this phenomenon