Edited by Anna Pavlovskaya and Grigory Kanarsh
The site was developed with the support of the Russian Foundation for the Humanities (project №13-03-12003).

Main/History and Theory/

History

The section ‘History’ contains fragments of texts and active links to other resources on the Internet. The most representative original texts on the problem of the study of the national character and mentality, from the age of Enlightenment to contemporary authors, are presented in the section. The very papers are: Ch. L. Montesquieu (‘The Spirit of the Laws’, the chapter on the national character), D. Hume, I. Kant (their essay about the national character of European and Asian nations); J. G. Herder’s article on the emergence of main races and peoples in the context of the philosophy of history; P.A. Gildenbrandt’s review of the article by the founders of national psychology (German researchers Steinthal and Lazarus).

The section provides links to full-text versions of Wundt’s books ‘Nations and their philosophies’ and to the French researcher A. Fulla’s ‘Psychology of the French people’; it also provides links to full-text PDF-versions of the books (with colour illustrations) of Russian and foreign scientists of the XIX and the early XX centuries that are devoted to the problems of studying the psychology of peoples, including ethnographic descriptions of the peoples in the Russian Empire (Pauli G.F., Georg G.).

There is a link to the full PDF-version of a pre-revolutionary edition of the famous book by I.A. Sikorskiy (‘General psychology with physiognomy’), where, among other issues, the issues of racial anthropology (from the viewpoint of a researcher in XIX–XX centuries) and main characteristics of the European peoples, including Russian people are discussed. This part of the site provides links to books and articles by contemporary American and European researchers of national character: A. Inkeles, R. Benedict, G. Hofstede.

Some texts (or their fragments) are presented in Russian translation (in particular, an article of a Dutch researcher G. Hofstede that contains the key principles of his well-known method in the national mentality studies, then Russian translation of the Introduction and the first chapter of the famous work by A. Inkeles, ‘National Character: psycho-social perspective’, 1997). The subsection also provides links to full-text PDF-versions of Russian researchers’ books (N.N. Cheboksarov’s book ‘Peoples. Races. Cultures’, 1985) that were written under the Soviet primordialist approach to the study of races and ethnicities.

Full texts in Russian