“Bodryi nash narod”: Semantics of bodrost’ in the context of the Russian national idea

The paper investigates the well-known passage of Alexander S. Griboyedov’s comedy The Woes of Wit (“Gore ot uma”), where the protagonist Chatsky characterizes the Russian people as bodryi nash narod (Act 3, Scene 22). It is the earliest known context for this word combination. Its semantics, seen in the broader context of the Russian national discourse of the epoch, demonstrates interaction of Old Russian and Western European language patterns. We propose a reconstruction of the sources of Griboyedov’s innovation. Our text-critical investigation has revealed that different editions and MSS of Griboyedov’s comedy present two variant readings in this phrase — bodryi / dobryi, and that the latter was dominant throughout the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century, although there can be no doubt about the authenticity of the former. Griboyedov uses the word narod in the meaning (new for his time) ‘lower social strata’, influenced by the corresponding meaning of the French peuple. Of importance for the semantics of the epithet bodryi is the New Testament cliché bodrost’ duxa, on the one hand, and the French and German expressions peuple vaillant, klug und aufgeweckt (-es Volk), on the other. In Griboyedov’s comedy bodryi denotes a special feature of the national spirit (“awakedness”) as opposed to the moral anemia of the cultural elite.