Olena Jansson Fd Pashnyk

English abstract.
A genealogical tree for the Russian Riurikid dynasty, kept at Uppsala:
description and genesis

Among the treasures in the university library in Uppsala (Sweden) is an extraordinary genealogical tree of Russia’s Riurikid rulers, beginning with the legendary Riurik and ending with Tsar Fedor Ivanovich, who died in 1598. The carefully drawn tree itself is quite realistic, with roots, a trunk and branches. The names of the 21 rulers considered to belong to the dynasty are placed in the trunk, whereas their brothers – irrespective of whether they had ever ruled (for instance, in Kiev) – are inscribed in medallions on the branches. The drawing is very large (ca. 82 x 65 cm), the tree executed in India ink and the rulers’ names in a different ink. Even though the drawing has been exhibited in Moscow, in the State Historical Museum (2001) and in the Kremlin Museums (2007–2008), to date there has been no determination of where it was produced (in Russia or in Sweden), when it came into being, and who could have been the scribe of the Russian names (or the artist who made the drawing of the tree). Of course, it cannot be excluded that the artist was also responsible for the names.

In this paper we argue that the genealogical tree was produced in Sweden. Moreover, there are strong arguments that the scribe for the Russian names was Aleksei Mankiev (Mankeev, Mankiewicz), who helped the Swedish scholar Johan Gabriel Sparwenfeld by producing fair copies of his manuscripts (for instance, of the famous Lexicon Slavonicum) and may have assisted him with translations. Mankiev’s sojourn in Sweden from 1700 to 1718 gives us a first approximation for the date of the drawing. We think that this can be narrowed down to “around 1715”, given the close relationship between the “Uppsala tree” and the Riurikid genealogy presented in Iadro rossiiskoi istorii, a manuscript which was finished in Sweden in 1715, either by “our scribe”, Mankiev, or by Andrej Khilkov, appointed Russia’s ambassador to Sweden in 1700, who was imprisoned there together with his suite (Mankiev, among others). Although the arguments are less convincing, possibly the artist was Johan Peringskiöld, a scholar of antiquities and genealogies.

The paper presents an unknown Russian translation of a rare Polish political satire from 1688 on political intrigues at the court of King Jan Sobieski. Both the Polish original and the Russian translation are published with detailed historical and linguistic comments.