"GOTHIC-SLAVIC KINGDOM": EARLY MEDIEVAL ILLYRICUM IN THE DISCURSIVE SPACE OF ETHNOPOIESIS
The article deals with the genesis and evolution of the medieval and early modern historiography notion of the so-called “Gothic-Slavic kingdom”, a vast and powerful polity, that supposedly existed in the early Middle Ages in the territory of Illyricum. While treating the image of “Gothic-Slavic kingdom” as a product of ethnic discourse, that is the method of structuring social, political, and cultural reality in terms of ethnicity, the author focuses on a way in which, at different times and in different social-political contexts, there changed the notion of the “Gothic-Slavic” kingdom’s ethnic affiliation and its connection with various “imagined communities”. Those changes are considered by the author as manifestations of etnopoiesis, that is a process, in which, in accordance with the changeable ethnic discourse, medieval and early modern authors in different ways interpreted social and cultural reality of the past by means of defining it in contemporary ethnic categories.