The Basics of Russian Identity

Abstract

The identity of Russian culture and its historical development was determined by the most important verbal and visual archetypes. The first include some key words identified according to the principle of “basic lexemes of a given language” by M. Svodesh, and the language structure that arose in the Proto-Slavic and Old Slavic eras. The second should include the sacred plastic images of medieval Orthodoxy, largely inherited from the Old Russian pre-Christianity of the second half of the first millennium.