“Duty, Love, and Hate…”: Russian-Polish Relations in the First Third of the 19th Century

Abstract

This review examines a book by E. M. Boltunova devoted to the “second coronation” of Nicholas I in Warsaw in 1829 and the memory of the Russian-Polish conflicts between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The novelty of the book is determined by the conceptualisation of the coronation through the methodology of the history of emotions and the history of memory in the contextual framework of R. Wartman’s “power scenarios”. Over the course of ten chapters, the author of the book reconstructs the spectra of emotions in the context of the formation of imperial symbolic and political mechanisms of governance of the Kingdom of Poland in the first third of the nineteenth century. The reviewer draws attention to the ambiguity of the number of interpretations offered by the author, resulting from the chosen methodological optics. The reviewer concludes that the book makes a serious contribution to the existing historiography of Russian-Polish relations in the first third of the nineteenth century by portraying, through the reconstruction of emotions, the Russian Empire as an extremely dynamic space.