The Foundation Myth as a Category of Historical Politics

The article is devoted to the reconstruction of the concept of the “foundation myth” in the context of historical politics. A number of overlapping concepts are analyzed that describe historical narratives that act as symbolic boundaries of ethnic and national identities. It is shown that the basic meaning of the concept of “foundation myth” had a narrower meaning, describing myths about the moment of the emergence of groups and political systems. Later, the context of the concept was expanded by Russian authors, who included in it the idea of the role of wars and revolutions in the formation of collective identity. An alternative research approach focuses on ethnogenetic myths about great ancestors. Within the framework of ethnosymbolism, the idea of “myths of origin” is developing, linking the past and present of modern nations through genealogical and ideological types of values. The broadest concept is the “constitutive myth”, which covers the totality of myths of the foundation of a separate national state. Within the framework of historical policy, it is important to identify the substantiating and counter-representative type of myths that describe different strategies for connecting the past and the present in historical narratives. As the analysis of examples shows, military narratives define most of the plots, which allows us to conclude that they play a central role in encoding cultural representations of identity. Most of the analyzed concepts describe the conflict of founding myths within states as a choice of the trajectory of national identity and ways of further development.