The author studied 40 pages (letters Д-Ж) of the Dokładny słownik rosyjsko--polski, written by the Ukrainian-born Russian P. Dubrowski and published in Warsaw in 1877.After a brief profi le of the now nearly forgotten lexiographer, the author adds a few additional questions to the known critical remarks about the topic of study and discussesin the context of the state of Polish language generally and of the Kresy in the nineteenth century -interesting fi ndings refl ected in this dictionary in the areas of spelling, phonetics, fl exion, syntax and lexis.She found that the Polish language presented in this Russian-English dictionary rather faithfully refl ects the nineteenth-century instability of norms at all levels of the language, so that non-native speakers of the language were more inclined to choose recessive over expansive variants, occasionally those supported by analogous forms in Russian.In the author's view, the prospect of a comprehensive, systematic exploration of this source is promising, especially regarding the possibility of extracting peculiar lexis from it, in particular so-called lexical agnonyms.