SUMMARY:

Aleksandr Kamenskii begins his article with the observation that the growing field of empire studies (or in a more paradigmatic rendering, “New Imperial History”) makes contemporary historians return to traditional questions of historical scholarship and cast them in a new light with the help of innovative interpretative frames, such as microhistory, local history, a history of everyday life, and a history of mentalities. A by product of this intersected historiographic development is the emergence of a line of inquiry that focuses on perception and languages of description of empire by different political and social actors (not necessarily representing the privileged and educated layers of society). In his article, Kamenskii surveys recent historical studies of the formative period of the Russian empire (from the Petrine reforms to the reign of Catherine II), and suggests possible interpretative frames and research questions that concern the problem of how former tsar’s subjects described, imagined, and related to a new political entity: the Russian empire. Kamenskii notes the exploration of this process, alongside with the inquiry into the historical semantics of employed concepts and categories, is even more important insofar as attempts to arrive at an essentialist definition of the character of the pre-Petrine and post-Petrine polity (be it a “state” or an “empire”) yielded meager and confusing results. In the first part of the article the author describes the development of historic concepts of “state” (gosudarstvo) and “Russian land” (russkaia zemlia), and notes that from the Time of Troubles through the first half of the eighteenth century there appeared a new meaning of the “state” as an abstract entity divorced from the persona of the ruler. This transformation paved the way for the emergence of the concept of “fatherland” in the Petrine political language, and concomitantly the concept of patriotism. These new concepts were a by product of the development of the Russian state and the process of secularization of Russian society in the eighteenth century. Alongside an abstract concept of the state as “fatherland” there appeared a new individuating concept of the emperor’s subjects, whose main duty was loyalty to the sovereign and love of fatherland. Kamenskii argues that research on these semantic transformations should continue, taking into account a peculiar feature of Russian political reforms and discourse in the eighteenth century, namely the reception of Western European texts, concepts, and discourses, and their telescoped historical development. The latter peculiar feature is very important for the author for he sees in the Russian case the coexistence of modern concepts of sovereignty and subjecthood (which constituted a foundational setting for the modern national state in Western Europe), and the belated formation of the modern state and empire. Kamenskii then turns to the figure of Lomonosov and devises a complex picture of the relationship between the national myth and the understanding of Russia in the imperial and Enlightenment framework – which would enter into conflict much later, and parallel the semantic differentiation of the concept of fatherland from that of the state. In his concluding remarks Kamenskii infers the unavoidability of a historical approach to the problem of patriotism that is overloaded with ideological connotations, and remarks that the inquiry into the history of patriotic discourse must be supplemented with exploration of the changing categories of description of imperial polity.