Ideas and Values: Britain and Russia in an Era of Transition

This article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the cognitive-rhetorical strategies of prominent British and Russian intellectuals in the context of the systemic crisis of the “era of transition” and in the process of the formation of cultural/imperial/national identities in Britain and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The authors focus on identifying a semantic shift in the cultural code of the emerging British and Russian identities based on the material of polemical works, sermons, and travelogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The authors employ the historical-comparative approach. It helps reveal the “golden ratio” of the cultural code, i. e. a value scale that undergoes cardinal changes in a tense intellectual discourse in a situation of the collapse of the universal picture of the world and the formation of new ideas about man, society, and the state. The study demonstrates an affinity between the logic of change and the dramatic collisions that accompanied the thinkers in the transition. Nor do the authors seek to smooth over the contradictions in contemporary historiography by offering their vision of the era.