Émigration, Étranger Ou diaspora ? Réflexions sur la transformation des termes et des concepts dans l’historiographie Russe Contemporaine

This article, not strictly speaking a historiography, focuses on the drafting of a biographical dictionary of Russian scientists who lived abroad during the first half of the 20th century. This work necessitates, beforehand, a conceptual and terminological framework. Researchers have different ideas about how to study emigration and do not share a view of how this phenomenon fits into Russian history. Furthermore, their interpretations of fundamental concepts, such as “emigration” (emigracija) and “foreign” (zarubež’e), “russkij” and “rossijskij”, diverge. Deploring the conceptual vacuum in emigration studies, several historians insist on the need to review and overhaul preceding approaches to analyzing Russian emigration (russkaja emigracija). Given this vacuum, broader questions arise about how to define this field of study. What terms and categories are to be used to describe the cultural and historic phenomenon of the diaspora — a national history and/or a collective memory, in common or in parallel, or the transnational history currently being written?