The text mentions the Russian city of Saratov, whose cemetery contains Polish tombstones. Among those mentioned are the tombstones of Stefan Mickiewicz, Katarzyna Bielinska, Aleksander Potocki, Paulina Szemeszowa and others. The tombstones, according to the author of the text, were moved to the courtyard of the Roman Catholic Church in Saratov; plaques were also erected to commemorate the deceased Poles (Source: Tygodnik Illustrowany, Warsaw 1909, Półrocze I, pp. 483-484, after: Digital Library of the University of Łódź).

A modernised reading of the text.

Polish graves in Saratov.

Not always and not everything could be written and printed from what one felt and saw. On a forced journey to the East of Europe, I based myself in Saratov, where I lived from 1899 to 1902. Getting to know the city and visiting its monuments, I wandered around the local cemeteries, of which there were several at the time: Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, Old Believers, Karaims, Subbotniks and Tartars. (In addition to the active cemeteries, there were also old cemeteries that were already full and had not been used for some time). In such an old Orthodox cemetery, where Catholics used to be buried as well, when they did not yet have their own cemetery, I found tombs which, because of their inscriptions, drew my attention. Deciphering the inscriptions was quite difficult, as a street had been carried out in the abandoned cemetery, the territory had been parcelled out, and monuments had been uprooted and overturned. The gravestones I mention were in a deplorable state, as the photograph, taken from nature, indicates. One lay outside the house and the other, in the middle of the courtyard, served as a stone bench. At a given moment, when I involuntarily directed my steps there, there was a lot of peelings on a rather high stone tombstone and there was a manger by which a horse was grazing. I will not say that this environment of life and nature made an unpleasant impression on me. The scorching sun of the sultry summer through the leaves of the trees cast bright spots and shadows on this picture combining past and present, death and life. Sensing the mood of the moment, my gaze caught a glimpse of some Latin letters carved on stone. Unusual in this cemetery, I leaned closer and read: "Mickiewicz". I threw down the peel, set down the manger, and having blown the earth from the folds of the letters, I read:
. Hic jacet
Stephanus Mickiewicz
Stali-medicus, alumnus univ. Vilnensis.
Natus gubern. Minscensiae anno D-ni 1772,
mortuus anno 1827, mensis februarii 21 die.

There was no Stefan Mickiewicz in the bard's family tree, but after all, Adam's namesake and an alumnus of the Vilnius University deserved to be remembered by those compatriots who lived in Saratov. I had the idea of restoring and protecting his tombstone. Returning with this resolve, I came across a fallen monument, made of coloured polished granite. Part of the inscription was lying in the grass; nevertheless, leaning over, one could read the following inscription in poor Polish:
. Beneath this monument lie the remains of the Honourable Countess Bielinika, née Ksienzniczki Galicki, court marshal of the Crown of the whole of Poland, starostess of Garwolin, born in 1775, died in 1826 in the 51st year of her age. Church records and history told the rest. "Bieliniki" was written instead of Katarzyna Bielińska, and "Princess Galicka" instead of Golicyn, and finally the date was misspelled, as, according to church records, the wife of the late Speaker of the Grodno Sejm of 1793 died on 8 July 1793. In recognition of his services to the Grodno Sejm, Bieliński, by the grace of Ambassador Sievers, was made court marshal of the Crown for "all of Poland", as the inscription reads. The Bielińskis' son, Stanisław, died in Saratov, as a Catholic, on 10 June 1837 and was buried in that cemetery, but I found no gravestone, the only trace remaining in the Saratov parish books. There I also found a mention that in 1838 the corpse of the late Alexander Potocki, born in 1795, was buried, death having taken him by surprise on a journey, and on 20 April 1843 the corpse of Pauline Potocki, born in 1843, was laid to rest. On 20 April 1843, the corpse of Paulina Szemeszowa, daughter of Ewa Felińska and sister of the former Archbishop of Warsaw, was laid to rest. She was living in exile with her husband Adam, a former philosophy student at Vilnius University, and died at the age of 33. The news had to be made public and passed on to the memory of her compatriots. The only rational thing to do was to move the existing memorials to the courtyard of the Roman Catholic church, the monument and inscriptions to be restored, and a plaque to be founded for Paulina Szemeszová. Having discussed all this in the bosom of the Polish colony in Saratov and having obtained material support, I proceeded with the matter. I thought that I would directly obtain permission from the authorities to take down the old monuments crumbling in the courtyards and squares of the former cemetery. I was mistaken, however: in order to proceed legally and openly to collect the monuments without moving the ashes deposited there decades ago, I had to obtain permission from the governor, the Orthodox consistory and the archaeological commission (which never functioned). Once the necessary paperwork had been completed, which took several weeks, the boulders were moved from the foundations where they had stood for three quarters of a century and taken to a stonemason. Once restored, the monuments were placed on a brick foundation in the outer break of the church, next to the entrance to the sacristy, and surrounded by a metal balustrade. Above the monuments, with the permission of the local parish priest and later bishop, Count Jerzy Szembek, and his successor, Rev. Canon Sztang, two stone plaques were erected.
A. D. 1901.
Honouring the memory of the institutions with which the deceased were indirectly connected, the tombstones of the late Katarzyna Bielińska, wife of the Speaker of the Grodno Sejm of the 17th century, were restored. Katarzyna Bielińska, the wife of the Speaker of the Grodno Sejm of 1793, and the late Stefan Mickiewicz, a doctor and student at Vilnius University, were restored and moved from the former general cemetery on the Volga River.
Polish Colony.
The second plaque, next to it, commemorates:
. Ś. P.
Paulina Szemeszowa
daughter of Ewa Felińska, sister of Sigismund, Archbishop of Warsaw, aged 33, † in Saratov d. 18/11 1843, buried in the old cemetery on the Volga River, where Catholics were buried too until 1846.
Plaque 1901 at the expense of the Polish colony founded.

When everything was ready, the memorials, after a funeral mass for the souls of the above-mentioned dead, were consecrated and placed in the care of the church caretaker. The costs amounted to 69 rb. 30 kop. which we collected among ourselves. The mediation of the collection and control of the expenses was kindly undertaken by Dr. Uziembło, Stanislaw Roszkowski, engineer H. Cywinski and T. Bialostocki, some of the most energetic members of the then Polish colony in Saratov. Let our compatriots, driven by necessity away from their homeland, vividly remember both the distinguished name of the Felinskis and the testimony that Poland once had a Sejm, that there was a Marshal's office, that there was the University of Vilnius, that there were compatriots who lived here, missed, died here... Sometimes it is better to speak about the institutions and offices themselves, rather than about those who held them at a given moment. This is what I had in mind when restoring the monument to the wife of the Speaker of the Grodno Sejm. Let us now take a look at the newer cemetery, where only Catholics have been buried since 1846. There are mostly German inscriptions on the tombstones, as Catholics-Germans are in the majority in the Tiraspol diocese. However, apart from Polish, there are also Russian and French inscriptions. In a word, there is a seemingly great tolerance in this respect, only when we take a closer look, we see that on some wooden crosses the engraved inscriptions were covered with putty. Over time, the putty fell off or cracked, and the inscription became visible:
"Great God, save the people, suffering on earth, and the souls of the dead in captivity".
Pole Tomasz Budny from Plock, it is again Mikołaj Rychnelik from Krakow, Alojzy Dobrosław Olski from Łowicki, Marcin Gryziecki from Galicia, Andrzej Sieradzki from Mazovia - all died in the 1960s, crosses like this were erected for all of them. This is also a page in the history of our nation's history... Let us go further. One of the most impressive tombstones is a barrow built over a corpse, and a monument to Hipolit Szapoliński, a Lithuanian doctor who served in the Hungarian, Turkish and Crimean campaigns and died in 1858. There are the graves of: Antoni Brzozowski from Podolia, died in 1849; Rev. 1849; Fr Tadeusz Kosowicz, a Uniate priest of the Polotsk diocese, died 1856; Fr Ignacy Zakrzewski, a priest of the Sandomierz diocese, died 1862; Mikolaj Wroczynski, a citizen of Volyn province, died 1853, etc... 1853, etc... I must conclude this long list of known and unknown names with that of the late Aleksander Frąckiewicz, an old man of over 80 years of age, who for his help for the insurgents after 1863 left Lithuania for Irkutsk and then settled in Saratov. He lived in a shelter and died in hospital. We laid him to rest in 1901. A peculiarity of the Saratov cemetery is the grave of Jan Nicolas Saven, a French citizen, lieutenant in the Grand Army of Napoleon I, born in Rouen on 17 April 1768. The old man lived to be 126 years old, healthy and active almost to the end of his long life. Having been taken prisoner in 1812, sent to Saratov as a prisoner of war, he acclimatised and lived to the age of 82. He received a pension from the French government until the end of his life, and a few years before his death was still a teacher of French at the local grammar school. The veteran's funeral was arranged by the town, and an inscription in Russian was placed on the monument:
"To the last veteran of Napoleon's Grand Army". The cemetery, known as "Mogilki", is located on the hills, overlooking the city and the Volga River, which calmly rolls its waves further and further.