ABSTRACT
Chronologically the earliest thought is that of “Official Nationality.” It could conveniently be dated to S. S. Uvarov’s triple formula of 1833; pravoslavie, samoderzhavie narodnost’. Voices about the relationship between Slavophilism and “Official Nationality” were heard in the 1840s, and they have arisen ever since, but the controversy assumed a somewhat better defined and perhaps more acute form in the early 1870s. Coinage of the term “Official Nationality” is attributed to the liberal nineteenth-century Russian historian A. N. Pypin ho published in 1871 and 1872 a series of articles under the general heading Kharakteristiki literatumykh mnenii ot dvadtsatykh do piatidesiatykh godov. Istoricheskie ocherki. During the 1830s and 1840s in St. Petersburg the theory of Official Nationality was heard, in Pypin’s words, in “those circles whose members included N. I. Grech and F. V. Bulgarin, O. I. Senkovsky, N. V. Kukol’nik, and where it strangely came in contact with literature and the police, with romantic fervor and enthusiastic good intentions.
