EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

In 1800 the Protestant Cantor, Christian Gottlieb Mielcke (1733–1807), published a bilingual Lithuanian–German dictionary that was based on a previous work dating from 1747 by the Protestant pastor, Philipp Ruhig (1675–1749), who had also published the first collection of Lithuanian folk songs. The work appeared in Königsberg with the publisher Hartung and included, as announced in the detailed subtitle, a preface by Mielcke, a second preface by the Berlin Protestant preacher and deacon, Daniel Jenisch (1762–1804), a third preface by the Königsberg church and school official, Christoph Friedrich Heilsberg (1726 or 1727–1804), and a “postscript of Herr Professor Kant”. Jenisch had been a student of Kant's and had gone on to publish on Kant's moral philosophy. Heilsberg and Kant had been fellow students. The Mielcke family (Milkus in Lithuanian) belonged to the Lithuanian minority that lived in Eastern Prussia (part of the Duchy and later Kingdom of Prussia), constituting Little Lithuania, which was predominantly Protestant. The majority of Lithuanians had lived in the dominantly catholic Grand Duchy of Lithuania that had been politically united with Poland since the sixteenth century. With the three Partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, 1793, and 1795 among Russia, Prussia and Austria, the Lithuanians' territories fell to Russia, and the Grand Duchy ceased to exist.