SUMMARY:

The article by Alexander Dmitriev reviews the lives and scholarship of three renowned philologists of “non-Russian” ethnoconfessional background – Nikolai Marr, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, and Ahatanhel Кrymskii. He approaches them as paradigmatic cases of the development of political projects of national autonomy during the first decades of the twentieth century as part and parcel of a more general conceptual transformation. New ways of envisioning the political arrangement in a multicultural society became possible after a methodological shift occurred in the late nineteenth century. Then, philology departed from its classical Humboldtian model with its focus on clear forms and direct genealogies, and modern linguistics emerged heavily borrowing from methodologies of the natural sciences. New philologists began studying the complex sphere of languages and cultures outside the framework of preset hierarchies (e.g., of pure “languages” and inferior “dialects”), which had very important implications for the conceptualization of social diversity. The three protagonists of Dmitriev’s article embodied the three main paradigms of political response to the new epistemological situation. Marr stood for a modernized imperial political entity, Baudouin de Courtenay was a federalist, and Кrymskii developed the position that in many ways anticipated the early postcolonial analysis of the 1950s.