Целую руки вашему величеству. Oб одном несостоявшемся жесте
‘I Beg Leave to Kiss your Majesty’s Hand!’ About a Gesture Which Never Happened

Summary/Abstract: On May 21, 1849, the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph I and the Russian Tsar Nicholas I met in Warsaw. At that time, the agreement according to which the Russian tsar would send 200,000 soldiers to defeat the Hungarian war of independence was finalized. Such a force alone was able to decide the war. Emperor Francis Joseph I was undoubtedly grateful to Tsar Nicholas. According to several historical works, he also expressed his gratitude with a theatrical gesture: he knelt in front of the tsar on the balcony of Lazienki Palace in Warsaw and kissed his hand. The study looks at whether this hand kiss really happened or whether we are dealing with a later legend. This is because this hand kiss has no trace in either the Austrian or Russian literature, it only occurs in Hungarian works. The story is first mentioned in one of the works of historian Dávid Angyal, and Angyal refers to a book review by Antal Hodinka. Hodinka seems to have misunderstood a Russian book he had previously reviewed, and Angyal did not verify Hodinka’s details. Since Dávid Angyal was a very respectable historian, the authors of later works took this data from him on trust. The interesting thing about the case is that we have data on a similar hand kiss from May 1849 – except that it didn’t happened between Franz Joseph I and Nicholas I. On May 1, 1849, the Austrian Prime Minister Felix Schwarzenberg wrote in a letter on May 1 requesting immediate military aid from the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian troops in Poland, Field Marshall Paskevich. Austrian Lieutenant General Bernhard Caboga, who had delivered the letter, also read the contents of the letter aloud, then knelt down and kissed Paskevich’s hand and tearfully begged him to save Austria. Probably this story was transformed in the memory of Antal Hodinka, and thus the legend about the hand kiss of Francis Joseph emerged.

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