IDEOLOGICAL ORIENTATION OF THE “NATURAL SCIENCES” CONCEPT IN THE MID-1950S SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT

Abstract

The article examines culturally determined meanings of the “natural sciences” concept in the mid-1950s Soviet historiography of the Decembrists. The theoretical and methodological basis of the work is connotative semiotics, developed by the French semiologist Roland Barthes. It is shown that the concept of natural sciences in the Soviet historiography of Decembrism has not only a direct denotative meaning, referring to the activity of obtaining verified knowledge about nature. This concept within the Soviet culture of the mid-20th century had an additional connotative semantic level. The narrative of Soviet historians about the study of nature by members of secret societies connoted, within the Soviet cultural code, the idea of the undoubted revolutionary nature of the Decembrists. Thanks to these connotations, the main goal of the Soviet historical narrative was achieved — the confirmation of Lenin’s thesis about the Decembrists as the first Russian revolutionaries who started the work that the Bolsheviks had completed. The study of the connotative semantics of the concept of natural sciences based on the semiotic approach allows us to speak about the mechanism of the conceptualization of Decembrism in Soviet historiography. Conceptualization was carried out at the level of a secondary sign system due to intertextual connections. The historical narrative through the signs of the active subject, applied aspect of natural science research, materialism, enlightenment, atheism was correlated with texts precedent for Soviet culture. Due to these correlations, the story about the Decembrists acquired an additional semantic level. The theoretical and methodological apparatus of semiotics is quite applicable to the history of concepts, since it allows reading semantics at all levels of the text — both denotative and connotative. Semiotics provides precise tools for analyzing the semantics of concepts in the context of their parent culture.