2011
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Catherine Lemagnen, « Un élément constitutif de l'identité nationale : le concept de narodnost' dans la pensée russe du XIXe siècle, essai de position du problème », La Revue russe, ID : 10.3406/russe.2011.2440
Considered initially as an aesthetic concept, instrumental in distinguishing the «Ancients» from the «Moderns» in the aesthetical debate of the 1 820s, the concept of narodnost' acquired in the 1830s a political dimension by becoming one of the pillars of Imperial ideology. Far from losing its literary connotation, the concept became a key issue in the struggle between Slavophiles and Westernizers in the years 1830-1 840. With the « Great Reforms » of the 1 860s, some thinkers started using the term narodnost' to conceptualise a nation politically conscious of itself, like Revolutionary France, instead of a community linked by the sole instinctive feeling of belonging to an organic entity as described by German idealism. Subject to significant semantic evolutions resulting from virulent polemics, the concept of narodnost' enabled the Russian world to be conscious of the evolution of its national identity, while underlining the importance of words and language in this process, thus taking vital steps in confirming identity