Authors

Discussion

The establishment of a (modern) national history is related to cultural mythology, and in the Russian context, it happened during the mid-nineteenth century. Dr. Maiorova raised the difference in conceiving the Riurik legend between the 1860s and early 70s and the 1840s Russian intellectuals as a case to illustrate such a relationship. The difference lies mainly in the concept of multiethnicity. While the Riurik was conceived as a pure foreign force in the 1840s, as indicated in the Romantic ideas, Russian intellectuals of the 1860s and the 1870s were more aware of ethnic issues in Russia, underlining the Slavic element of the Riurik legend and promoting the idea that Slavs, chiefly Russians and sometimes including Ukrainians, were vested with power to lead all Russian ethnic groups to bright future (as the Riurik did centuries ago).

My research interest lies in elaborating further on the 1840s Russian context by exploring the role of scientific specialization in transforming the perception of knowledge. This scientific way of studying knowledge significantly altered how intellectuals processed information, as evidenced by the shift from natural science to biology in early-1800s Europe. Nevertheless, this “specializing” knowledge trend occurred in Russia only after the 1830s. This intellectual lag not merely led to the ensuing national debates between Slavophilism and Westernism but to the impact of the scientific method on intellectual writings. I will illustrate it through the relationship between Vladimir Dal and Ivan Turgenev. Dal, holding an official post in the Russian army and being assigned to the Western provinces, contributed simultaneously to compiling an explanatory Russian dictionary and observing Russian people, including peasants and ethnic minorities (and publishing articles based on his observation in the journal “Sovremennik”). Dal’s scientific attitude of applying an anthropological study method to observe Russian “peoples” and glean Russian words from the provinces impacted Turgenev, who worked under him during the early 1840s. Turgenev mentioned that the depiction of Russian peasants and the portrayal of women in literary writings was (at least partly) inspired by Dal’s works. 

In a nutshell, the 1840s context illustrates more of the scientific attitude in the intellectual world that can be distinguished from the 1860s context and thus provides room for reconsidering mid-nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history out of national and ethnic scopes.