“Mobilization of the Middle Ages” as an instrument of formation the discourse about Slavic unity

Abstract

In the Middle Ages the theme of Slavic unity was not developed. It was discussed by intellectuals of that time in two directions: 1) the unity of origin; 2) unity of faith. In the Early New Time, in the period of the formation of the Slavic early modern nations, these ethnogenetic legends were connected with the history of local national herous, dominated over the discourse of the Slavic Unity. The idea of Slavic unity gets explosive development in the late XVIII-XIX centuries. It was connected with the growth of the national liberation movement. The twentieth century with two world wars, two Balkan wars, a Soviet-Polish war, etc., when the Slavic peoples found themselves on different sides of the front, and a short period of existence of national states Eastern Europe (1918-1939) brought disunity to the Slavic world. About his imaginary unity only cultural memory remained. Then a brief outburst of the unification of the Slavs was associated with the Soviet project of the “belt” of socialist countries (or “cordon countries”, as it was called in the West), was kept at the will of the USSR and quickly ceased to exist with its disintegration in 1991. Medieval symbols and images in the 20th cnet. worked more for national projects than on the idea of Slavic integration. The 21th century brought the Slavic idea by postmodern deconstruction. The Slavic idea today has lost its positions and holds a secondary existence as an idea of a cultural and shrinking memory of the past.