Authors

Discussion

This paper examines the evolution of the Russian word raznoobrazie (“diversity, variety”) across the nineteenth century, tracing its shift from aesthetic description to a concept of social and political order. Drawing on the Russian National Corpus, nineteenth-century dictionaries, and ethnographic texts, the study explores how raznoobrazie survived its lexical relatives (raznost’, raznstvo, raznota) thanks to its semantic flexibility and openness to new ideological contexts.

Early in the century, raznoobrazie described visual or sensory variety—raznoobrazie form, zvukov, narodov—in artistic and ethnographic texts. By mid-century, administrative and legal writings redefined it as a structural condition requiring control: “the diversity of departments demands agreement and a common direction.” In the late imperial period, it became a political idea. Phrases such as zakonnost’ plemennogo raznoobraziya v edinstve (“the legality of ethnic diversity within unity”) signaled a conceptual turn: diversity acknowledged, but only under the principle of unity.

Combining corpus linguistics with conceptual history, the paper argues that raznoobrazie charts the emergence of a bureaucratic understanding of plurality distinctive to the Russian Empire. Unlike Western “diversity,” grounded in liberal inclusion, raznoobrazie retained an organicist meaning—difference integrated into hierarchical order. Its semantic history reveals how language reflected Russia’s negotiation between multiplicity and centralization at the threshold of modernity.