Russian Diaries and Memoirs about War for Polish Succession (1733-1735) as Historical Sources

Abstract

The article is devoted to the use of diaries and memoirs as historical sources in the study of the war for the Polish Succession of 1733-1735. Relevance of present research is explained by low degree of studying of the given military conflict in the domestic historiography and weak development of its source base. The novelty of the work lies in the attempt to examine the diaries and memoirs of Russian participants and contemporaries of the war as informational sources about this conflict, and to assess their information potential. The authors analyze the researchers’ attitude to the memoirs, as well as the ratio of memoirs and sources of official origin in the works about the war. The authors focus on the source analysis of diaries and memories about this military conflict. In the article the problems are covered of socio-cultural conditions of the emergence of the diaries and memoirs; circumstances of their creation; sources of sources; their relationship to each other; author’s intention of writing these essays; history of publication of the diaries and memories. It is concluded that the records of the participants and contemporaries of the war for the Polish Succession as a whole contain valuable information about this military conflict, but are not devoid of properties, because of which researchers rarely turn to diaries and memoirs and prefer other sources.

Keywords

• xviii век
• 18^th century
• polish-lithuanian commonwealth
• war for polish succession
• historical source
• source analysis
• russian memoirs
• diaries
• memoirs