Slavophile Perceptions of “Russian” and “Russianness” in the Late 1830s and the First Half of the 1840s

The notion of “narodnost’’ was one of the central concepts in Russian discussions of the 1820s–1840s, first in literary criticism and then, from the early 1830s, it acquired official status. At the same time, it became a question rather than a designation of something at least relatively clear and definite, as evidenced by the literary disputes about “narodnost” and “prostonarodnost” of the 1820s and early 1830s. The enormous contribution to the concretisation of the notion of “narodnost” as applied to Russia, to the saturation of Slavophilism’s notions of “Russian” and “Russianness” is beyond doubt, regardless of the assessments given to this contribution. This article focuses on the early period of Slavophilism, from the late 1830s, when the Slavophile circle began to take shape, to the mid-1840s, when Slavophilism had already clearly taken shape and, among other things, was able to produce a number of texts (the preface to the Valuyev’s “Collection…” in 1845, the polemic with “Sovremennik” in 1847), which were perceived and are perceived to this day with due reason as “manifestos” of the direction. The article analyses the texts of the main authors of the Slavophile trend of this time: A. S. Khomyakov, Yu. F. Samarin, K. S. Aksakov, D. A. Valuyev and I. V. Kireyevsky, and demonstrates the directions of concretisation of the concept. Particular attention is paid to the logic of singling out Orthodoxy as a constitutive characteristic of “Russian” and the tension of this construction.