Abstract

Wilno (Vilnius) the second capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, home to Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, Jews and Tartars, was conquered, heavily destroyed, and occupied by Muscovite forces from 8 August 1655 until early December 1661. The lecture will focus on the period of destruction and rebuilding in a city marked before and after the Muscovite occupation by “the cacophony of the bells; the competing and intersecting religious and secular processions; the variety of dress, grooming, and speech patterns, and the occasional, more or less gentle, mutual derision; the simultaneity of feasting and fasting; the sense of passing from neighbourhood to neighbourhood; and above all the sense that all this variety could be publicly expressed and in all corners of the city.”

David Frick is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been a member of the faculty, and frequently chair of Department, since 1982. Trained in philology, which remains one of the central tools in his work, his research interests have gradually moved toward socio-religious history, especially of the multi-confessional and multi-religious Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He is the author of Polish Sacred Philology in the Reformation and the Counter Reformation: Chapters in the History of the Controversies (1151-1632), Meletij Smotrys’kyj, and Kith, Kin, & Neighbors: Communities & Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno. He has also recently taken on literary translation; the most recent effort resulted in the complete Polish letters of Fryderyk Chopin, to be published by the Polish National Fryderyk Chopin Institute (Warsaw).