The article explains why, in 1909, there appeared instigations in Russian public discourse calling for closure of the Lithuanian Catholic educational society ‘Saulė’ (The Sun), and at the same time criticism was directed at the governor of Kaunas, who supposedly was the patron of this association. This action of Russian nationalist is interpreted as a reflection of the empirewide struggle against non-Russian public organisations. It was Russian public figures and civil servants promoting a nationalistic nationality policy who wanted to close the ‘Saulė’.
In the article, the genesis of the first Lithuanian socio-political newspaper Aušra (Auszra) is associated with the Eastern crisis (1876–1878). The political aspirations of the Aušra are verified in the context of the Russia-England (Olga Novikova–William Gladstone) discourse.
The paper focuses on an extract from the treasury archive of Vilnius Lower Castle from the 1640s. The research provides new data on the sociotopography of a part of the city of Vilnius and the suburb of Antakalnis (Antokol) in 1566 and reveals the fate of some documents kept in the treasury archive after 1655, when the Russian army occupied Vilnius and a fire ravaged the archive. The extract, which is published for the first time in this article, is included in the appendix.