Le paysage des géographes russes : l’évolution du regard géographique entre le xixe et le xxe siècle

Abstract

From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Russian geography developed under the influence of different scientific trends and social practices. The history of the concept of landscape reveals in a spectacular manner the evolution of the geographical approach to the environment. By the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘landscape’ was viewed as a universal category, and was being widely used by Russian geographers. This term, however, did not appear in Russian geography until the end of the eighteenth century, with the adoption of two words of foreign origin: Landschaft and paysage. For two centuries these words were synonyms, but by 1930-1940, the term Landschaft had been restricted to a scientific meaning, at a time when the word paysage was beginning to be used to refer to scenery. How did the Russian geographical schools affect the evolution of the word landscape? What led to the divorce between the terms Landschaft and paysage ? What is the role of these two words in contemporary Russian geography? The author attempts to explain the particularities of the development of Russian geography between the end of the nineteenth and the end of the twentieth century through the analysis of the evolution of the concept of landscape.

Keywords

• geography
• landscape concept
• epistemology
• evolution