What are nationalities: the search for a definition

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:54

In Soviet historiosophy and aesthetics, there is such a term as nationality. This is far from an unambiguous word that requires clarification and definition. We will talk about what nationalities are and how the understanding of this term has developed in academic circles below.

First mentioned

It is believed that for the first time the term "nationality" was used in a letter from P. Vyazemsky, which he wrote while in Warsaw, to A. Turgenev. The year was 1819 then. Since that time, the debate about what nationalities are has not subsided. First of all, this concerned history, but also strongly affected literature and other spheres of human activity and science. In 1832, the famous formula "Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality" appears. This happened with the light hand of S. Uvarov, who recognized in the word of interest to us one of the main categories of philosophy.

Social Realism

As an ideological concept endowed with aesthetic functions at the same time, the term entered the formula of socialist realism. It sounded like this: "Ideological, party spirit, nationality." But it was already significant.later, and more on that below. By and large, until the middle of the nineteenth century, thinkers who tried to answer the question of what a nationality is, the definition was most often found in national categories. Thus, the concepts of "nationality" and "nationality" were often perceived as synonymous and interchangeable.

Polish tradition

But besides those mentioned above, there were other interpretations both within Russia and abroad. Thus, the consonant Polish term narodowość was used in two ideological meanings. The first was sustained in the spirit of the Enlightenment and implied the identity of the people-state. The second was more connected with Romanticism and included the concept of the identity of the people-culture.

Russian alternative

In Russia, too, there were, although rare, alternative answers to the question: "What are nationalities?" For example, the term could be understood as the personification of the common people, as the personality of the people from the lower classes, as opposed to the intelligentsia and the nobility, brought up in line with Western European culture.

Further development before the revolution

Gradually, the definition of what nationalities are has become increasingly nationalistic and even chauvinistic. If in the middle of the nineteenth century and a little later this term could still be understood as a definition of an original culture without reference to nationality, then in the years immediately preceding the coup of 1917, under the influence of positivist ideas, the use of this word wasa sign of bad taste and backwardness. And in the minds it was more and more closely identified with nationalist ideas.

Soviet period

What is nationality in the history of the USSR, it is definitely impossible to say, because the content of this word was radically transformed several times in the Soviet ideology. Initially, they wanted to disown him altogether, as a relic of monarchism. The term became relevant again after 1934, when the end of the class struggle was announced at the 17th Congress of the Bolsheviks and the category "class" gave way to the more general one - "Soviet people". Accordingly, instead of class, they began to talk about nationality. By the end of the 1930s, this word had become firmly established in Soviet everyday life and acquired such a powerful ideological significance that any attempts to challenge or reject it were perceived as anti-Soviet activity. On the other hand, there was no clear definition that made it possible to unambiguously indicate what a nationality is. In the literature, for example, it was indicated, among other things, that such writers as Pushkin and Tolstoy were “created by the people” and this was a manifestation of the people. Someone said that writers express nationality in spite of their class character. Still others believed that principled democracy is hidden under this word. Definitions with hints of nationalism sounded again. For example, G. Pospelov tried to find out what nations and nationalities are. He wrote that this term should be understood as "an objective nationwide progressiveness of the content." Another version of the definition is based on an attemptidentification of nationality and party spirit. But the further after Stalin, the more clearly the awareness in the USSR of precisely national identity in its connection with the nationality became.

Russia in the post-Soviet period

The category of nationality was also accepted by thinkers in the post-Soviet period of Russia. But, as in Soviet times, there is no unanimity among them. On the one hand, people are equated with Orthodoxy, trying to revive the values of the famous formula, desiring the restoration of the monarchy. On the other hand, nationality is also closely associated with national identity, drawing an equal sign between them. These two tendencies are similar in one thing, namely, that they postulate the superiority of society, the collective over the individual, over the individual. This is a relic of both the Soviet and the imperial system, and to this day it is inexhaustible.

N. Lysenko, the opinion was expressed that a more objective explanation of what a nationality is will be given in the future, since this term will certainly be preserved as a mental category and an integral part of the future, just beginning to form the ideology of the state. Today, in his opinion, it is possible and necessary to confine ourselves to a very conditional and vague definition of nationality as all-Russian. But still, the intuitive correlation of nationality and nationality remains the mainstream, in which the collectivist "we" prevails over the individual "I".