Articles

This article is devoted to the problem of the name of the Qing settlement, commonly referred to as Maymachen. The toponym Maymachen was one of the most well-known geographical names mentioned in various texts dedicated to Russian-Qing relations. It was usually used as the name of the settlement, which had been located on the Russian-Qing border on the opposite side of Russian towns of Kyakhta and Troitskosavsk. In the 18th century this area became the center of Russian-Qing trade and the place, where diplomatic contacts between Russian and Qing governments were conducted. As such, it was repeatedly described in travelogues and reference books, regularly mentioned in dictionaries and diplomatic correspondence; a number of articles and books devoted to local commerce and language contacts were compiled. However, the history of the local Qing settlement has been poorly studied to date and even its name has been incorrectly used in Russian texts, which referred to it as “Maymachen”. The real Chinese name of this place was “Qiaketu”, which also, like the Russian word “Kyakhta”, originated from the Mongolian toponym “Hyagt”. The name “Maymachen” (or maimaichen according to the modern norms of transcription) was used in Chinese for the trade settlements and there were several “maimaichens” in other Mongolian cities. Thus, in the case of Qiaketu, a generic term for a specific part of the town (maimaichen) was used as the name of the whole town. The article considers the circumstances that contributed to the emergence of this peculiar situation, and the resulting errors in the interpretation of the content of geographic and historical materials.

The article analyzes the restoration of the Buddhist sangha in Mongolia after 1990 in the context of theories of Buddhist modernization in the twentieth century. Many works discuss the interaction of Buddhism with Western teachings and culture, but Mongolian Buddhism has received insufficient attention in this regard. In recent decades, Mongolia’s role in Tibetan-Mongolian Buddhism has grown. Buddhism in contemporary Mongolia is connected to religious revival and is also an important part of national, ethnic, cultural and political processes. There is a tendency towards the modernization of Buddhism in Mongolia, while the state also regards Buddhism as a means of preserving national culture and traditions. Traditional and modern forms of Buddhism are not clearly separated in contemporary Mongolia; believers sometimes use traditional practices and views to address modern problems.

The article focuses on various contexts in India’s ancient didactic texts dealing with money. The issue under discussion is whether ritual pollution was transferred from person to person through money. Ancient Indian sources repeatedly state that property acquired at the expense of punished criminals necessarily needs ritual purification. The reason for this is explained by a “similarity relationship” between the property and its owner: a sin of the former owner gets transferred to the property recipient. In this case, it is necessary to explain the issue of punishments that prescribe property confiscation. According to India’s ancient didactic texts, confiscation is often replaced by a monetary fine. Does this mean that money does not transfer the ritual pollution of its former owner to a new owner? How can we explain this paradox? The article analyzes the vocabulary used in ancient Indian texts to denote money and examines various money-related contexts. Finally, it offers insights into a possible understanding of the role of money in ancient societies.

On the basis of analyzing the works of the Persian poets of the XI–XVII centuries, the author of the paper has made an attempt to trace the main stages of evolution of the genre of Shahrashub, which is little dealt with in Iranian studies. Such study is meant to throw some light upon the process of evolution of minor genres of Persian poetry throughout the classical (X–XV c.) and postclassical (XVI–XVII c.) periods. Revealing the generic forms used by Persian poets for writing Shahrashubs, the author has made a number of suggestions concerning the reasons for their choice of different poetic forms. The main stress is made upon the analysis of verses of two outstanding poets – Mas‘ud Sa‘d Salman (1046–1121) and Sayido Nasafi (d. 1711), whose works have served as basic landmarks on the way of the evolution of the genre.

The article is focused on the problems of defining the governmental policy of the Republic of India towards the former princely territories after their integration into newly created independent state, constructing of the image of “princes without princely states”, revealing the reaction of princely community to republican political system versus the ideals of monarchy. The article traces the destinies of princely dynasties in contemporary India and dwells on the problems of incorporation of their representatives into modern Indian society based on democratic traditions. The article shows the process of transformation of the attitude of Indian ruling circles to traditional elites of South Asia and reflects changing repercussions of this problem in national historiography. The article raises the questions whether the princely dynasties of India can be measured in terms of “gone with the wind” traditional groups destined to extinction or they managed to become a part of modern composite ruling stratum and what social and political values prevail in the minds of the common population of the former territories of princely states.

This article examines the poetics of Eastern Han epistles (second century AD), the first poetic love messages in the history of Chinese literature. The works discussed are Qin Jia’s poem “Sending to My Wife” (Zeng fu shi), his three-part poetic cycle “Remaining in My Native Region, I Send to My Wife” (Liu jun zeng fu shi), and an anonymous poem, “The Daughter of Shaofu Cui Bestows a Poem upon Lu Chun” (Cui shaofu nü zeng Lu Chong shi). These works had not previously been translated into Russian or studied in Russian sinology. The analysis considers poetic form, composition, themes and motifs and their connections, the genre features of the epistle, features of other genres, and means of artistic expression. As the works include poetic cycles as well as individual poems, the article also discusses the poetic cycle itself. It concludes by identifying general features of the poetic love epistle at the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

Punjabi Sikhs’ presence in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands can be traced back to the nineteenth century. The number of Sikh units in the British-Indian army increased after the annexation of Punjab (1849); Sikh army and police were employed to operate the Andamans-based Kala Pani (Black Water) jail. The Police Gurdwara of Port Blair became a visual marker of Sikh presence in the archipelago. In 1937, the New Gurdwara was set up; it was later renamed Dr Diwan Singh Kalepani Gurdwara to commemorate Diwan Singh’s contribution to India’s national liberation movement and his humanitarian and educational work in the Andamans. In the late 1960s, the Indian government invited former servicemen, primarily Punjabi Sikhs, to settle in the Nicobar Islands to protect them from poaching and to show India’s presence in that part of the Bay of Bengal. A “Mini-Punjab” subsequently emerged on Great Nicobar in the 1970s. Throughout their history in the Andamans, Sikhs strove to reproduce their homeland in a faraway land. Unlike other Sikhs in Bengal, Assam and other regions far from Punjab, the Andaman-based followers of Guru Nanak did not have to continually assert their identity through negotiation with local social and cultural traditions.

The article is devoted to proving that Yang Xiong (53 BC – 18 AD), an outstanding Chinese thinker, writer and scientist, is the creator of the first explicit rhetoric as a theory of literature in China. From this point of view his work in world sinology has not yet been considered. The article reveals the main factors and features of the formation of ancient Chinese doctrines on oratorical art using the results of research on archaeological excavations of the last three decades. Ancient Chinese rhetoric has gone a long way of development from latent to explicit form with the selection of poetics from it. The works of Yang Xiong are one of the final stages of this process. The main provisions of Yang Xiong’s rhetoric are revealed on the basis of the study of his treatise “Exemplary Speeches” Fayan, which is both the theory and practice of literature, because on the one hand, it formulates the theory of rhetorical poetry and prose, and on the other hand it is conceived by the author as a canonical example of its literary embodiment. This thinker understands literature very widely, it covers all the main genres and types of writing that were formed by that time. A special role in it is given to canonical literature, which combines the features of the canon and classics. Yang Xiong gives poetry and prose a rhetorical character, makes a functional distinction between oral and written speech, but it is with the text that he binds the creative act, making writing primary in relation to oral presentation. He pays special attention to the aesthetic side of ancient Chinese literature. Yang Xiong also gives a rationalistic interpretation of divine inspiration, examines the phenomenon of creativity and develops the category of individual authorship.

The article, based on Moroccan and Egyptian examples, offers a historical retrospective of political and economic interactions between the ruling circles of the Arab lands and powerful clans of descendants of Prophet Muhammad (sharifs), which resided in the North Africa since the early Middle Ages. The authors demonstrate the causes of friendly relations between the ruling structures and sharifian families. Typical social and economic conditions for usage of charitable endowments (waqfs) and land grants (azibs), provided to the advantage of sharifs, are also reviewed, as well as historical and cultural background for transformation of waqf and azib lands into private property. The authors trace back the etymology of azib and argue that its semantic content was due to existence of semi-nomad camps on the cattle-pass routes. Special attention is paid to the legal status of population living in waqfs and azibs, as well as factors of economic efficiency of these economic units. The study explores the continuity and stability of their evolution on specific examples. Reasons for development of wakfs into azibs, which remained typical in Moroccan (not Egyptian) history, are also outlined.

The paper discusses polysemic onomatopoetic words in Japanese. Several models of semantic development are identified among 371 words from the Japanese-Russian Dictionary of Onomatopoetic Words, including both giseigo and gitaigo (sound and image mimetic words). The meaning of a polysemic onomatopoetic word generally develops from the concrete to the figurative and abstract: for example, from the description of a sound to a movement associated with it, or from an image or state associated with movement to human feelings and emotions likened to that state. The paper confirms some universal patterns in the semantic development of polysemic words, including metaphorical and metonymic transfers of meaning.

The present paper provides a survey of Indonesian women’s prose (so-called sastra wangi) that has been gaining strength since the end of the twentieth century and has become one of the central phenomena of modern Indonesian literature. In connection with the subject of discussion, some information on gender studies and feminist literary criticism is given. Sastra wangi possesses distinctive features that distinguish it from purely entertaining chick-lit. Similar processes are found in the literature of many countries, as shown by examples from Indian, Turkish and Chinese writing. Modern Indonesian women’s prose can therefore be viewed in the context of Asian and African women’s writing in general.

The article discusses the poetological features of the story “Infinite Present Time” (1998) by A. Kulin, which are studied on narrative-compositional and image-bearing levels. The unusual chronotopos (playing with time and space), along with the psychological motivation of the characters and the acute social problems, permit us to say a lot about the fictional code that is dominant in this work of the writer. The present tense (=yor) is intended to increase the sense of tragedy and make the events described more dramatic. The present tense in this story seems to absorb the past and replace it, presenting past events in a tragic perspective through the prism of today. The present tense (=yor) is also used to describe events that the main character believes will happen to her in the future. They also evoke a persistent sense of hopelessness and anxiety. In such a way, the present tense accumulates all other tenses, apparently becoming infinite: there is nothing but the present, a message which the story’s title emphasizes.

The article analyses economic and political aspects of Algeria’s development against the background of the so-called Arab Spring, reflects on the role of the country’s president who had been honored as a man who stopped the civil war by a national accord. However, in the author’s perception, the current events resulted in deep social differentiation, the emergence of a new oligarchy, built on a splice of military, bureaucracy and private business. The author portrays some of the Algerian leaders, as well.

On the basis of Russian-Chinese parallel corpora, with a focus on academic texts in the social sciences and humanities, this paper examines the universal of как structures in two aspects: equivalence and foreignization. We hypothesize that such equivalence has mixed features. To test this hypothesis, we: 1) classified Russian sentence patterns introduced by как into seven types, four “integral” (for example, the “so that” pattern) and three “split” (for example, the “so…that” pattern). A statistical analysis of Russian как structures and their Chinese equivalents found that equivalence distributions differ between the two languages, with Types Two and Four in the integral group and Type One in the split group having the greatest equivalence; 2) tested the foreignization hypothesis by comparing the distributions of Chinese structures corresponding to как patterns in a translation corpus and a comparable corpus: 正如 (zhengru, just as), sentence-final 因为 (yinwei, for), and the idiomatic structures 如此……以致 (ruci…yizhi, so…that) and 没有……就 (meiyou…jiu, if not…then). Translators tend to follow the conventions of the source language, Russian, rather than those of the target language, Chinese.

The paper examines the semantic domain of falling in modern Japanese. The domain is comprised of two verbs of falling down, ochiru and furu; two verbs of falling over, taoreru and korobu; and one of falling and rolling, korogaru. They differ in their preferred type of trajector (objects for ochiru, rain etc. for furu; animate for korobu, unspecified for taoreru). Some finer characteristics can also be seen: for furu other trajectors than rainfall are acceptable if they come from above the viewpoint. For korobu the trajector must be self-propelling. For vertical objects the resulting prostrate state is covered by taoreru even if the fall itself comes under ochiru.