The Concept "Taiga" in the Siberian Discourse of the 19th Century and Its Interpretations

The aim of this article is to describe the history of the concept "taiga" the in Siberian discourse of the 19th century, to identify the key images associated with this concept and the main sociocultural, political, and economic factors affecting the transformation of the concept. The material is journalistic texts, reports of travelers and Siberian officials, forestry literature, and fiction of this period. The research methods are the tools of humanitarian geography, the history of concepts, and the sociology of nature. The study revealed that during the first half of the 19th century the word "taiga" was gradually becoming one of the central concepts for the description of the Siberian landscape. In the first quarter of the century, the use of the concept was caused by the interest of Russian society in the Siberian exoticism, the way of life, natural environment and language of the indigenous and old Siberian population. With the growth of public attention to the region, the development of gold mining, the growth of Russian journalism, and the emergence of Siberian literature, the concept became one of the most important for describing the space of Siberian colonization. In the structure of images of Siberia, "taiga" reflected and strengthened the mythologem of the region as a "cold", "harsh" and "boundless" country, on the one hand, and a country of undisclosed possibilities, a "storehouse of Russia" or a "golden Eldorado", on the other. Taiga is a "frontier", borderline concept, which is very frequently used in texts on the colonial development of the region. At the same time, during the first half of the century, the concept did not gain terminological clarity and was perceived as new and unfamiliar for the European part of Russia. "Taiga" meant not only the Siberian forest; it was a special space that endowed real geographic objects (Siberian mountains, forests, rivers, etc.) with certain meanings. Key of them were associated by contemporaries with "desolation", "savagery", but also with "primordially" and "greatness". Similarly, "taiga" denoted a borderline state between the natural and the social, making it possible to mark human relationships in the taiga with the characteristics of "wildness" and "unnaturalness", or, vice versa, of harmony with nature. In the ideological program of Siberian regionalists (G.N. Potanin, N.M. Yadrintsev), the taiga became a symbol of social unrest and problems in the region caused by the colonial policy of the Russian authorities.

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