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SHORT NOTES

mostly of noble background. They dealt mainly with Poland’s history, not only political history but also the history of art, law and medicine, as well as local and regional history. What characterized their works was provincialism, and the fact that their aims, subjects and research methods were not original but derivative. This is visible if we compare them not only with German and Austrian historiography but also with Polish historiography, especially with the works produced at the University of Wilno, where Joachim Lelewel was active at that time. This changed in the 1860s, when Cracow became the cradle of a histori-cal school which used scientific methods to question the achievements of Polish Romantic historiography.

The author has madę use of reminiscences and the press of the epoch but, first and foremost, he has based his book on an analysis of over 120 published works and manuscripts. (MM)

Jerzy Kukulski, Generałowie carscy i ich majątki ziemskie w Królestwie Polskim, 1835-1920 [Tsarist Generals and Their Estates in the Polish Kingdom, 1835-1920], Warszawa 2007, Neriton, 393 pp., annexes, index of persons, sum. in Russian

On the basis of a decree issued by Tsar Nicholas I in 1835, senior Russian offi-cers who distinguished themselvcs in suppressing Polish fights for independence were rewarded with estates in the Polish Congress Kingdom. The majority of the estates were treasury estates which after the last partition of Poland became State property of the Russian Empire; some were confiscated from the Catholic Church or from individual owners. The awards were granted after the defeat of successive uprisings — the November Uprising of 1830-1 (the first wave of endowments occurred after the above-mentioned decree of 1835) and the January Uprising of 1863-4; individual grants were awarded after 1870 and later. Morę than 200 persons received estates. The tsar's decree had strictly political aims in view; the endowment fees were a form of reprisal for the insurrections and were to pave the way for the Russification of the landowning class in central Poland. The aim was, however, not achieved; the new owners, preoccupied with military scrvice or wishing to advance in their career, usually left the manage-ment of their estate to administrators (who did their best to plunder it) or if they lived there, they succumbed to the influence of Polish landowning neighbours and Polish culture. The outbreak and course of World War I deprived the Rus-sians of contact with their estates. The resolution adopted by the Sejm in reborn Poland on 25 July 1919 abolished the endowments and returned the estates to the Polish State.

KukulskPs book, based on solid materials from Polish and Russian archives as well as on published sources, does not make exciting reading and requires a great deal of goodwill and concentration from the reader. But it is certainly very useful for researchers interested in property relations in the Congress Kingdom in the 19th century, especially those who try to reconstruct the relations between Poles and Russians when Poland was under Russian rule. (MM)