Народи, народности и граждани в писането на българския ХІХ век
Peoples, Nationalities, and Citizens in Bulgarian 19th Century Writings

Summary/Abstract: uses of the concepts “people,” “nation,” “nationality,” and “citizen” to the discourses of the 19th century prominent Bulgarian writers and political journalists Georgi Rakovski, Petko Slaveykov, Ljuben Karavelov, Christo Botev. The analysis reconstructs the 19th century polysemic status of “citizen” in a variety of political attitudes and causes: as a noun or predicate it could equally mean “townsman,” “layman,” “civil”/“civilian,” “civic,” “political,” “social,” “public,” etc. This way “citizen” could not concentrate into a semantic focus that enables strong political identifi cations even in the 19th century revolutionary discourses (this makes the traditional idea about the direct impact of the French revolution and its language on the Bulgarian 19th century national movements problematic enough). On the contrary, concepts like narod (which could mean both “people” and “nation”) and narodnost (nationality) proved able to concentrate all kinds of political platforms, identifi cations and activities. This constellation of “weak” terms (“citizen,” “civic”) and “strong” terms (“narod,” “nation”) proved consistent even after 1878 and affected the fi rst major political documents of the independent Bulgarian state, as well as the language and political identity of the new institutions.

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