On P. I. Pestel's Political Vocabulary

Abstract

The article discusses Pavel Pestel's basic conceptual political vocabulary and raises the question of what specific meaning the choice of a word from a political dictionary or a translation of a foreign concept meant to him. The work is based on the text of Pestel's «Russian Truth», with the involvement of his other writings, testimony at the investigation and Nikita Muravyov's constitutional draft. The Decembrists belonged to the strata of the Russian nobility, who spoke and wrote in French at home. They also discussed their political ideas in French, which was supposed to slow down the development of a corresponding Russian conceptual framework. However, they wrote their constitutional drafts in Russian, which allows us to raise the question of their developing a Russian political conceptual vocabulary. Pestel, influenced by the ideas of A.S. Shishkov, compiled dictionaries of "purely Russian" terms to replace foreign borrowings, but did not use them in the compilation of "Russian Truth". Avoiding gallicisms as much as possible, he used mostly well-established words that were generally understandable to the Russian public. The features of Pestel's choice of terms are traced, which concepts are important to him (people, state, citizen, freedom, elections, representative government, prosperity, etc.), which are rare (nation, citizenship, democracy), which, contrary to expectations, are absent (monarchy, republic, constitution). The use of basic concepts by Pestel and Nikita Muravyov is compared.