| الوصف: |
The article was written as part of the «Dialogues, disputes and battles: propaganda during the Great Northern War 1700–1721» project, which I am currently working on at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden). The project has received funding through the MSCA4Ukraine project, which is funded by Euro-pean Union. This part of the research deals with the concept of «unnatural behavior» proposed by me and its reflection in political discussions and information confrontations of the first quarter of the 18th c. In addition to comparative analytics (placement of tangible material in a pan-European context), I also use more specific methods (of suicidology, sometimes gender history). In early modernity, suicide was tra-ditionally classified as a conditional list of «unnatural» crimes, along with betrayal of country and mo-narch, the practice of magic, sexual practices that did not lead to conception (under the general term «so-domy»), heresies, atheism, blasphemy. Conceptually, all these phenomena were united by the idea that they violate the normal world order and lead to a distortion of the idea of divine creation, which means that they serve the purposes of the Devil. Also, due to the involvement of broad international contexts, the study has perspectives in the field of global history. The scientific novelty: little-studied documents from the archive of the British diplomat Charles Whit-worth about Muscovy and the Hetmanate during the Great Northern War 1700–1721 make it possible to consider the phenomenon of suicide not only through daily life, but also through the political optics of that time. This is especially interesting in the Eastern European dimension, where the study of the «unnatural» is still not very common. |
