2013. 3

The paper analyses the dynamics of the transformation of Turkey’s party and political system from the 1980s to the early 2010s according to five variables: voter activity, electoral volatility, fragmentation of party system (effective number of parties), level of political competition, and proportionality of party representation in parliament. The growing stabilization of Turkey’s party and political system makes it increasingly difficult for any new political party to find an electoral niche and facilitates the migration of electorate between old parties. Reformation of the party and political system and creation of a new matrix for political life forced the opposition to search both the new strategies of political struggle and new approaches towards electorate and to revise both party ideology and programs.

This article tackles the problem of the state of the Japanese economy in the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. Why can’t it recover from the crisis of the 90-s? Can it possibly be that traditional indicators do not capture part of the utility generated in the economy of the country? If it’s really so, how large the Japanese economy really is? Traditional and alternative indicators are used to tackle these problems.

In the article, based on a series of computations and models, it is shown, that global economy which on the whole had been rapidly progressing since the start of the 19th century, during the last thirty years has noticeably slowed down rates of its growth. There are investigated causes of the paradoxical phenomenon, when, despite the emergence of foundations of knowledge-based economy in the advanced countries, there came about, according to generally accepted statistics, substantial decrease in growth rates of their GDP and Total Factor Productivity. Also are specified the scales, determinants and major restraints of the Asian economic upsurge as well as major components and contradictions of modern Russian developmental model. There also are provided an assessment of socio-economic and a number of political consequences of unbalanced growth of the world economy and a prognostic estimate of contours of world economic growth for the nearest decade.

The article is devoted to analyzing a specific plot construction in Gao Xingjian’s novel “Soul Mountain”. Its form inherits a Chinese traditional collection of miscellaneous notes “biji” which in its turn creates a certain problem in the plot unraveling. Because of essayistic inclusions parts of the event flow in the novel aren’t closely connected, but are scattered in different parts of the text. However, through differentiating two levels of narrations in these various notes (the level of I-author and personal projections You/He) we could define the novel’s event course and its characteristic features of the conflict.

The article is devoted to the little-studied period of the development of Persian Literature, which, nevertheless, can be characterized as an important stage in the stylistic evolution of the traditional poetry. The works of one of the most popular poets of the period Hatef Isfahani (died in 1784) show the process of formation of the new poetic style, based on the idea of returning to the classical norm. Hatef’s poetry demonstrates both the gap with the closest predecessors and significant differences with the stable repertoire of classical poetic motifs.

This publication presents the first translation from old Japanese to Russian language of one chapter about “ceremony of living beings releasing” from “Hachiman gudoukin” (“Admonition for stupid children about Hachiman”, XIV). This ceremony is performed at Iwashimizu shrine in Japan (Yawata city, Kyoto prefecture). Iwashimizu is a major shrine of Japanese tutelary deity Hachiman. Hachiman is known as a protector of the emperor and the state. Shrine chronicles link an origin of the ceremony to the suppression of Hayato tribe uprising in 720; the suppression was led by Hachiman as the protector deity of state. The rite is a blending of the Buddhistic doctrine of compassion and prohibition against killing the “living beings” with the Japanese practice of “appeasement” of spirits of those who died in the military campaign against Hayato.