Freedom and democracy as understood by Andrei Siniavski in the light of a linguistic and historical-cultural analysis of the essay La civilisation soviétique

The year 2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Andrei Siniavski, a Russian writer known to the Western world for his work in defence of the public. Siniavski, who died in France in 1997, is known as the author of Soviet Civilization, published in France in 1988. The aim of this article is therefore to analyse the process of the conceptualisation of freedom and democratic ideas undertaken by Siniavski in the essay Soviet Civilisation, using the writer’s own linguistic means. For this purpose, we will proceed to a definitional analysis of the lexemes naming the concept of freedom, an etymological analysis to trace the history of the concept and its subsequent semantic evolution, and a contextual analysis.