2014.2

This paper deals with adjectives describing slippery, smooth, and even surfaces in Chinese within the framework of lexical typology. The analysis is based on a typological research on language categorization of surface textures. After the discussion of semantic oppositions between the direct uses of the adjectives in question, the semantic map for Chinese is constructed and some suggestions for the further elaboration of the map based on Chinese data are made.

This article discusses the development of artistic principles Wang Anyi’s novels about Shanghai. Despite the emphasis on depicting everyday city life in accurate and historically authentic detail, analysis of the art features and “points of view” within the novels reveals a double-layered narrative structure in which describing real life coexists with depicting an illusory existence. Therefore we can make certain conclusions that artistic representation of Shanghai in late novels is leaning more towards non-realistic and subjective approach. The article also emphasizes constructive significance of the concept of dream in artistic world of Wang Anyi’s novels.

The problem of our research is how the semantic field of thickness is divided by the lexemes in Russian and Chinese languages and what features can describe the difference between these lexemes. This study is performed within the framework of lexical typology. Methods used include context analysis of dictionary articles and corpora examples; questioning of native speakers informants. The goal of this study is to give a detailed analysis of the semantics of Chinese adjectives with initial meaning ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ and to give a comparison of systems of meanings between Chinese and Russian adjectives from the semantic field of thickness.

The following article focuses on the state policy towards Islamic education in Turkey during the Ataturk era. The author analyses various governmental measures towards the Islamic educational system and the establishment of a secular educational system. Special attention is paid to the consistent deconstruction of traditional educational institutes.

The article concerns the processes of voluntary islamisation in the Bulgarian provinces of Ottoman Empire in XVII–XVIII cent. Using materials of the sharia courts registers (sicills) of Sofya the article tells us about probable motives and reasons of conversion to Islam, their life like “new Muslims” and integration to Ottoman society.

This article is dedicated to insufficiently studied cultural and educational activities of Abdurrezak Bedirhan, one of the most influential Kurdish political figures at the end of the XIX – beginning of the XX centuries, a fervent supporter of strengthening of the Russian-Kurdish relations.

This article considers the biography of Hadzhi Zagidullovich Gabidullin, the first head of the Department of History of the Colonial and Dependent Countries of the Historical Faculty of the Moscow State University of M. V. Lomonosov. In the history of oriental studies H. Z. Gabidullin has got popularity as a researcher of Islam and Turcology. His work in co-authorship with A. Arsharuni “Sketches of Panturkism and Panislamism in Russia” even now represents considerable value because a large number of the most interesting archival documents on “Muslim affairs” from funds of the Department of Police of the imperial Ministry of Internal Affairs were published in it for the first time. H. Z. Gabidullin prepared a work on the history of the Young Turks’ revolution and supervised Russian-Turkish scientific communications at the level of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in the mid-thirties. H. Z. Gabidullin was one of the Soviet “responsible authorities” supervising the development and introduction in Russia of alphabets based on Latin script. In May 1937 he was accused of participation in a counterrevolutionary nationalist organization and helping “Trotskyists” and was soon subjected to repression. In 1957 H. Z. Gabidullin was rehabilitated. However, his name and activity were long consigned to oblivion.