Schierle Ingrid

This article examines the development of the Russian concept of politics during the period in which the modern Russian literary language was emerging. The semantic analysis is based on dictionary entries, translations, government publications and journalistic writings that dealt with the topic of the political. Russia’s political vocabulary expanded and became more diff erentiated over the course of the 18th century. The traditional term “state matters” (gosudarstvennye dela) was supplemented by the foreign term “politika” and its derivatives, and Aristotelian and Machiavellian semantics of politics entered into Russian discourse. This adoption signalled the orientation of elite discourses towards Western categories of thought and Russia’s membership among the nations of Europe. This article presents the specifi c semantic contexts that were created through this transfer and the lexical means that were used in Russian to talk about the domain of politics.