Toward a history of a Western loanword: CRISIS as a starting point or as a dead end in Russian and beyond

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Abstract

The specialization in the medical sense of the term crisis found, through Latin mediation, an extraordinary widespread diffusion in all European languages, also reaching Russia and, from there, the Caucasian region. The present article, after briefly tracing the etymological and lexical history of the word crisis and its semantic vagaries in the Russian (imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet) cultural space, focuses mainly on an ideologically connoted meaning of the term, which, starting from similar reflections in the Western world became in the Soviet context a sort of characteristic mark of the degenerate bourgeois society (and science), a kind of blind alley in which the capitalist world had got itself into, and to which a new way of doing science was instead opposed in the context of the construction of a new society, based on completely different values. If therefore the crisis, in the capitalist economic world, has always been seen as a beneficial factor of development, very different was - and could not have been otherwise - the interpretation of the term that was proposed in the Soviet era.