The history of concepts is a complex discipline. It has no status of an independent subject in the high school curriculum, yet it tries to grope its place among such well-established disciplines as etymology and history of ideas, history of philosophy, history of culture. The history of concepts is subject to all the risks and has all the possibilities of interdisciplinary heuristics. In the era of the rule of biology, natural sciences and economics, the history of concepts is suspected of speculation, uncertainty and worthlessness. It cannot be a source of utilitarian express-information due to its diachronic and abstract nature. By 'concept' I mean a certain spiritual concept covering the full complex content of the word, which is a keyword or basic concept of the history of ideas, culture and society, i.e. spiritual history, for a specific long or short period of time. The history of concepts explores genetically-semantic, historical processes of formation and transformation of these keywords. Such studies include not only descriptive, but also significant reconstructive and sometimes speculative, and some deliberative components. The longer the concept exists, the more 'unfounded' and 'fathomless' it becomes. In the immediate vicinity of the history of the concepts there is the history of constructs, the history of ideas, historical concepts, the history of discourse, discourse analysis, historical semantics, semantic of cultural studies, cultural linguistics, keyword research, etc. Surely, we must consider linguistic sciences as well: onomasiology, synonyms, antonyms, phraseology, and so on. fBut if Germany regularly publishes collection of works on the history of concepts, in Russian this branch of the Humanities is in its infancy, for several reasons. 1. The initial discipline, from which the history of concepts originates, is philosophy. However, Russia has got a very poorly developed philosophical tradition. The fate of philosophy and religious philosophy in the Soviet Union is well known, while the genuine history of concepts requires uncensored work with sources, broad-based knowledge, the freedom of thought, and rejection of ideology. 2. Many other important scientific branches of history of spiritual life in Russia, and later in the Soviet Union, could not progress properly. Classical philology and jurisprudence, which are important for the development of the history of the concepts, survived a 'catastrophic decline' after 1917. There was no solid foundation for the Roman law in Russia, which affected the assimilation of concepts and moral values of personalism. The Marxist-Leninist historical science after 1917 was based on the ideological system of coercion, which, of course, destroyed theology and history of religion. The freedom of thought could only exist in the internal emigration. 3. Russian and Western linguistics primarily studied etymology, semantics, lexicology, phraseology and terminology, rather than the classic history of the concept. The formal models of descriptive linguistics, mathematical linguistics and computer science are even more remote from the history of concepts. 4. The scientific schools of literary studies such as formalism, structuralism, rhetoric, narratology, deconstruction, absurdism and others do not make the slightest contribution to the history of concepts. Nowadays among the most attractive branches of the Humanities is the theory of mass communication, communication strategies or Iconic Turn (eye turn). The regulatory methods are far more popular than the sense-making approaches like the history of concepts. 5. The history of Russian concepts is even a greater complexity due to the bilingual Russian verbal culture, i.e. the Russian-Church Slavonic diglossia that existed before. Besides, in a certain period of Russian history, there was the Russian-French-Church Slavonic triglossia, at least among the Russian educated elite, to say nothing of numerous borrowings from Greek, Latin, Dutch, Italian, German, and English. The Russian language is overloaded with borrowings, calques and international words, which often entail the transfer of concepts. 6. The Russian language is characterized by the doubling of concepts. This phenomenon is not widespread in Western languages (compare 'svoboda'/'volya', 'pravda'/'istina', 'mir'/'svet', 'uzkiy'/'tesny' etc.). However, despite all mentioned above, the Russian history of concepts offers a wealth of material: it could have collected more extensive sources and make it available. It must be acknowledged as the inevitable difficulty that Russian concepts are in tense relationships with the semantics of the word and the text; that being borrowed from other languages, they are often insufficiently defined and seem to be in limbo, hovering between the poles of meaning and opinion. What Russian science really lacks in this field is fundamental large-scale projects, like the historical dictionary of philosophy, or the dictionary of basic concepts as well as special editions such as the archive of the history of concepts. The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) should undertake corresponding obligations and promote the fundamental long-term projects in this area. Only in this way the foreseeable future can bring the standards of western historical and conceptual studies and address the issues of transfer of concepts and the comparative history of concepts. A great historian Sergei Solovyov said, "We are Europeans, and European values are not alien to us".
