2018.1

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.

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.

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.

A qualitative leap in knowledge about the Ottoman Empire and Islam achieved under Peter I was due not only to a subjective factor — the decision of such statesmen and scholars as P. A. Tolstoy, D. Kantemir, P. I. Yaguzhinsky and S. L. Vladislavich-Raguzinsky to join the tsar. In many ways, it was dictated by an objective factor, namely the practical need for knowledge of the Turks and Islam in the context of a military confrontation between two powers and two worlds: Russian Orthodox civilization and Muslim civilization in its Ottoman form.

This article explores how women in contemporary China answer to unemployment challenges which have affected China after its shift towards the market oriented economy. The paper discusses the changing approach to body politics in China as an answer towards rising rate of unemployment among Chinese women. It traces the history of how market reforms and changes in educational policies have put Chinese women in a position where they have to seek help of plastic surgeons to increase their value on the job market. The author argues that due to a rapid economic development of China and rise of the middle class with a larger disposable income, competition for employment in China has increased dramatically, which made women highly vulnerable, pushing them to use body alterations to secure jobs.

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 contains an excerpt from a letter by Vissarion Sartov, the nephew of the prominent pre-revolutionary orientalist Palladius (Kafarov) and the first psalmist of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Japan. The excerpt from a letter to an unknown person, dated July 28, 1873, was found in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts and is published for the first time. It contains information about the early preaching of Orthodoxy in Japan: rivalry with Catholic missionaries in the former province of Sendai; features of Orthodox worship in Japanese; the organization of the church and the life of the Orthodox community in Hakodate; and Vissarion Sartov’s personal assessment of the prospects for Orthodoxy in Japan. It also mentions Nicholas of Japan, who had moved from Hakodate to Tokyo by the time Sartov wrote the letter.

Based on a series of indices and models calculated by the author, the article shows that the contemporary second major wave of globalization, substantially more extensive than the first (from the last third of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century), has had a major but contradictory impact on the economic development of advanced countries and, even more so, of developing countries. It has enabled some of the latter, including China and India, to carry out rational institutional and economic reforms and gain ground in the world economy at the expense of Western countries and Japan. However, globalization has also energized market forces and significantly aggravated economic, financial and socio-political instability around the world.