Creating meanings and traps: competing interpretations of the idea of nation in the debates of Russian Slavophiles and Westernisers in the 1840s

Abstract

To use Benedict Anderson's metaphor, there are different ways to ‘imagine’ the nation. This means that in the same community there might be various competing interpretations of ‘an idea of nation’. They contribute to some kind of ‘repertoire of meanings’, to which participants of nationalist discourses consciously or unconsciously appeal. If so, it is useful to explore the process of shaping and interaction of competing interpretations of ‘an idea of nation’, resulting in (terminal) domination of particular cohesions of meanings in the public discourses. This article offers a case study of the debates between Russian Slavophiles and Westernisers in the 1840s that are treated as the controversy between two distinct models of ‘an idea of nation’, the conservative-traditionalist and the liberal-progressivist. This distinction, familiar for many countries, was especially evident in Russia with regard to the problem of the preservation of ‘the national self’ in the context of ‘catch-up’ modernisation which took a significant place amongst the complex of issues that shaped the nationalist ‘repertoire of meanings’.