SUMMARY:

In the present issue, the archival section features a pamphlet by a famous Russian nationalist and anthropologist, I. Sikorskii. The selection of this unusual archival document (it was eventually published in 1915 but became a rarity soon thereafter) was predicated on the general intention of the present issue to demonstrate the variety and mutation of discourses on Russian nationhood. Sikorskii’s text presents an encyclopedia of scientific and pseudo-scientific statements; it is distinguished by its engagement of both the concept of empire and non-Russian nationalist challenge and it highlights a rhetorical transformation of Russian nationalist discourse in the context of public politics and the urgency of international competition with European powers. Sikorskii’s redefinition of the basic dilemmas of Russian nationalism drew heavily on the new and fashionable at the beginning of the twentieth century science of anthropology and its key element – the concept of race. The very conception of a scientific approach to politics testifies to the particularly modern character of Russian nationalism in late imperial Russia and calls attention to the ambiguous relationship between politics and knowledge, which was revealed in Sikorskii’s antisemitic stance as an expert during the Beilis trial. The concept of race allowed Sikorskii to blur the historical and cultural distinctions of the population of the Russian empire in order to come up with an unproblematic picture of a consolidated nation state capable of assimilation. A large part of the pamphlet is devoted to an analysis of the relationship between Jews and the Russian nation. With a move that is strikingly unconventional for a Russian nationalist, Sikorskii (following Renan’s famous text “What is nation?”) contrasts the archaic and racial pattern of Jewish life with the European, modern character of the Russian nation. The text of the pamphlet displays in a condensed form the continuity of numerous tropes of Russian nationalist thinking as well as ruptures and mutations in the development of Russian nationalism. The publication is foreworded and supplied with commentaries by Marina Mogilner, who provides outlines of Sikorskii’s scientific and political career and places his vision of anthropology in the context of the history of Russian science.