THE TRANSFORMATION OF CIVILIZATIONAL DISCOURSE IN THE NATIONALISTIC RHETORIC OF S.S. UVAROV

Abstract

In the article, the author analyzes the processes associated with the transfer of the European nationalist concept to the Russian Empire. Namely, the attempts of the Minister of National Education, S.S. Uvarov, giving legitimacy of the ideology of official nationalism with the help of the transformation of civilizational discourse that developed by the beginning of the XIX century. The author of the article proceeds from the position of the inextricable connection of the concepts of civilization and nation under the conditions of a specific nationalist discourse that developed in the imperial metropolises in the first half of the 19th century. Thus, in solidarity with some provisions of the theory of “liberal nationalism” by E. Hobsbaum, the author of the article traces a similar scenario in the Russian Empire. Namely, that scenario when the concept of nationalism, absorbed by the Russian Empire, forming a kind of alloy with the previously mastered the idea of a civilizational mission, becomes an excuse for imperial hegemony. The research focuses on a S.S. Uvarov’s civilizational concept that substantiates the emancipation of the Russian Empire within Europe, through the ideas of neoclassicism, the philosophy of German romanticism and orientalism.