Alien Cultural Innovations in Russia: Alterative Models of National Identity

Abstract

The study proves that the polemics between liberals and traditionalists about foreign cultural innovations reflects two ways of foreign cultural borrowing: constructive and destructive. Constructive way implies that those foreign cultural forms to be borrowed may be successfully combined with national civilizational forms and traditions. According to this method, innovations are adapted to the local soil. The destructive way of borrowing is based on an attempt to replace national civilizational forms with foreign cultural ones. The study has established that the alternative models of Westerners (liberals) and Slavophiles (traditionalists) represent different ways of reflecting the specific Russian cycle of introducing sociocultural innovations, in which three stages are distinguished. The firs one is the imitation, when they try to introduce alien forms directly, without adaptation, artificially and mechanically, by force. The second is the stage of adaptation of foreign cultural forms through their transformation in accordance with national characteristics. The third is the stage of constructive appropriation, i.e., deep processing and synthesis of foreign cultural forms with national characteristics, transformation of foreign cultural innovation into an original national form. The authors come to the conclusion that with via constructive form of innovation, society effectively goes through all three stages, and with a destructive one society itself deforms along with deforming foreign cultural innovations, without reaching the third stage.