ИЗВЕСТИЯ СОИГСИ

Keywords: Alans, Mongols, South China, conquest, written sources.

The issue of Alanic warriors slaughter that occurred in the time of the rule of the Great Khan Kubilai during the occupation of one of the cities of the Southern Song Empire by the Mongolian troops is investigated in the article on the basis of information presented in Marco Polo’s narrative and in Chinese «History of Yuan». The study of this issue seems relevant since these sources giving the general outline of these events in the same way, differ in some details namely differently spelling the name of the city, where these events took place. A brief description of these sources and a comparison of the information presented in them are adduced as well as the historiography of this issue containing contradictory location of the events being based on the varied information about this issue available in these sources. The study maintains that there are four narratives containing information about the death of Alanic warriors during the Mongols’ conquest of the Southern Song Empire: three of them are contained in the biographies of the As chiliarchs Adachi and Yuwashi and of the As ruler Hanghusi’s and his descendants presented in «The History of Yuan», and the fourth is contained in Marco Polo’s narration which has come down to us in various editions. Comparison of the information on this issue provided by these sources allows to suppose that Marco Polo’s designation of the city of Changzhou as the location of the events is erroneous since the city is named Zhenchao in the biographies of the As military leaders presented in the Yuan History. At present the city of Zhenchao is a city county of Chaohu that is part of prefectural municipality of Hefei, the center of Anhui Province.

Keywords: Nart epic, kernel, polycentricity, national centres, Scythian-Alanian basis.

One of the most contested issues in Nartiada is in what ethno-cultural environment the formation of the initial core of the epic had been taking place. The disputes go back to the publication of V. I. Abaev’s famous book on Narts’ epics, where the Scythian-Alanian environment was clearly marked as the original core legends had been formed in. In accordance with E. I. Krupnov’s concept of polycentricity, Narts’sagas are regarded as the result of original creativity of the Caucasian peoples. The concept provoked the emergence of the works in which to the Adyghe-Abkhazian basis of the formation of the epic were consecutively added also the Ingush and Karachay-Balkar centers. The works of Abaev, Dumezil and others give the author profound basis to argue that there is a single Scythian-Alanian core of the formation of the Narts’ Sagas with the subsequent borrowing of the epic by the neighboring peoples.

Keywords: ritual, feast, women, magic, prayer, ritual baking.

The article considers the gender differences in the traditional religious rituals of the Ossetian people. Women’s participation in sacred practices could have been much more significant than it is commonly believed. The underestimation of the role of women in the religious life of the society is due to the established stereotypes, which are based on the idea that the place of women in this area is secondary and subordinate to the dominant role of men. Female ritualism was accompanied by sacral actions the contents of which varied according to the agrarian calendar. During winter and spring they were related to the need to protect crop field from flow slides and floods, to provide successful seeds germination, in summer — to request the heavenly host to protect crop fields from hail and drought, in autumn — to provide magical actions, focused on keeping harvest in safety, protecting corn from rodents and worms. Woman would become involved in sacral practices during the first year after her marriage. As a participant of ritual actions a young wife appeared for the first time during the celebration of Donyskafan. From that day on young woman was allowed to sacral sphere of her new family, and through this sphere to the religious life of the whole rural community. Besides situational ritualism, caused by current problems (rainstorms, drought), annual female holidays existed in Ossetia. The most famous among them are Ostalty Kuvd and Fyduani. Mostly, women were important participants in rituals, except exclusively men’s ceremonies. But even in these cases, women gave a boost in ceremonies by baking ritual pies, brewing hopped beverages. Rituals of agricultural beliefs were often accompanied by erotic actions, which in accordance with the ideas of the fertility of nature were supposed to stimulate it. The material of the article suggests that special female sacralization existed in the Ossetian society, which differed from the male sacralization, being its objective complement.

Keywords: Balkars, ethnic adaptation, high mountain populations, demographic behavior, age of marriage, natural reproduction of the population.

The relevance of historical and demographic research is largely due to the complexity of the modern world and regional demographic processes, which have a great impact on the sustainable development of both national states and individual ethnic groups. The purpose of this article is to show the features of demographic behavior model that has developed in traditional Balkar society based on the analysis of materials of demographic statistics, ethnographic and comparative historical studies, works on the ecology and biology of high mountain populations. The scientific novelty of this study is that for the first time the historical demography of Balkaria is considered here in line with the concept of ethnic adaptation, understood as the process and result of the interaction of the factor of the natural-geographical environment (ethnic landscape) created within its framework of economic and cultural type (life support system) and population (ethnic group) with its demographic parameters (levels of fertility, mortality and nuptiality, family organization, age and sex structure, public health). The dynamics and level of demographic indicators, together with the life support system created by the Balkars, are considered by us as criteria for the ethnos to be adapted to their own, in many ways extreme, natural-geographical living environment. To achieve the stated goal, taking into account the interdisciplinary nature of this study, we used general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis; such historical methods as historical-genetic, historical-comparative, historical-typological; demographic methods such as methods of demographic coefficients and models. As a result of the study, the following conclusion is made: this model is the result of a long process of adaptation to the conditions of the highlands, which specifies its particular parameters and limitations of the reproductive and marital behavior of the population, which served as the basis for the sustainable existence of a small ethnic group in the conditions of extreme natural environment.

Keywords: ethnographic cinema, visual anthropology, Lebedev, Chechnya, Soviet national policy.

The article on the example of the classic documentary film «The Country of Nakhcho (Chechnya)» (1929) of Nikolay Alekseevich Lebedev, the pioneer of the Soviet ethnographic cinema, discusses newsreels as a historical source. The film, shot by the Sovkino group during the 1929 scientific-cinematic expedition to the Caucasus, focuses on the traditions of the Chechen ethnic community, as well as their transformation under socialism. Analyzing the data of the periodical press, biographical notes of the director and published evidence of the contemporaries, the author traces the development of this film project in connection with the parallel processes in the national policy and social ideology of the USSR at the turn of the 1920‑1930‑s. The final version of the film «The Country of Nakhcho» is a kind of cinema-text, consisting of approximately the same number of film frames and text captions alternating in the narration. Therefore, the method of analyzing a film as a visual-text work was its research interpretation — «translation» into text format. Based on the analysis of the film text, the article explores the potential of cinema as a form of a multicomponent visual anthropological work that displays on the screen the culture of what is being filmed and of the creator of the film, projecting the silhouettes of the culture and ideology of its time to the screen. In connection with the consideration of the film in the aforementioned socio-historical context, the article concludes that the phenomenon of anthropological film as an effective form of research knowledge, allowing to record and broadcast over time not only actual events, but also their imaginative context that is so important for anthropological study.

Keywords: mediatization, media research, Ubykh (s), Tevfik Esentch, revitalization, identity.

This article is devoted to detailed consideration of strategies for constructing Ubykh identity in the media space. Having got into all spheres of life of the society, media not only successfully replaced traditional ways of communication, but also expanded communicative opportunities of the person and ways of his personal identification. Against this background, there is a blurring of the boundaries between online and offline, which allows building the most creative behavioral strategies on both individual and group levels. In the narrow sense, these strategies also addressed the issue of ethnic representation. They were also relevant for the Ubykh community, which was constantly credited with the status of an «extinct» people or people who lost their own unique language. The analysis of qualitatively new narratives shows that the discourses of Ubykh’s «extinction» and «revival» coexist harmoniously within the limits of virtuality and are regularly actualised by the activists of the revitalization support. Along with the more familiar (publications in the media, documentaries, television reports) other tools for mobilizing ethnicity such as hashtags, nicknames, thematic «community» in social networks are also popular. The identified characteristics are confirmed by the materials of the expedition to the descendants of Ubykh in Turkey (autumn 2015), and field work in the Black Sea Shapsugia and neighboring Abkhazia (summer — autumn 2018) to study separate families, claiming their «Ubykh» descent. The described tactics and strategies help to understand how Ubykh identity is constructed, as well as to doubt the stability of the opinion about the final destruction of the community.

Keywords: emotional expressive verbs, expressiveness, language picture of the world.

The article explores the functions of emotionally expressive verbs (simple, compound and complex forms of the verb) in the language of the works of A. A. Guchmazty. These verbs form the dominant language component of the writer’s artistic texts. The emotional-expressive properties of the verbs in the Ossetian language are associated with their denotative meaning and the connotative features of their morphological forms, as well as with semantic-stylistic properties acquired by the verbs in the artistic context. They are a universal way to characterize the emotional and mental state of the actors, form the author’s subjectivity. Linguistic images, in the creation of which emotionally expressive verbs participate, provide an insight into the national vision of the world’s picture and form the language picture of the world of the people. In the works of Guchmazty images of villagers living according to established moral standards are created. To create expressive context, Guchmazty uses verbal means, which include expressive verbs in the metaphorical meaning, complicated by personification, comparison, and hyperbole. The writer knows the psychology of his readers well, understands how each of them can perceive someone else’s pain, emotion, understand the act and what words can convey his message to the reader.

Keywords: participle, dependent taxis, functional-semantic field, aspect-taxic situations, temporal relationship, motivation relationship.

The system of participles in the Ossetian language has not been yet comprehensively investigated. There are no special works where the categories of participles, their grammatical characteristics, their grammatical categories of aspect, tense or mood have been subjected to thorough analysis. The identification of all distinctive features of Ossetian participles in comparison with the system of the ones in the Russian language is relevant for the given article. This is due to the fact that, firstly, the Russian and the Ossetian languages belong to different groups within a single Indo-European language family and differ in the degree of predominance of elements of analyticism in the expression of grammatical meanings; secondly, in the conditions of Ossetian-Russian bilingualism there is active interaction of the Russian and Ossetian languages, which is obviously reflected in the system of participles. The scientific novelty of the research is based on the description of all the variety of aspect-taxic situations in the constructions of dependent taxis with participles in the Ossetian language in comparison with Russian. The aspect and lexical meaning of the participial forms are taken into account, and the place of Ossetian participles in the functional semantic field of taxis is identified. The analysis revealed that the participle, being the exponent of the meanings of the dependent taxis, belongs to the more distant periphery of the functional-semantic field of the dependent taxis in Ossetian as compared to the participle in Russian. This is due to the fact that they are much less regular, less specialized in the expression of the attributive function. The expression of taxis meanings for future participles expressing the modality of expediency seems not to be significant at all. The characteristic features of the constructions of dependent taxis with participles in Ossetian are determined: chronological relations between the participial action and the action of the main predicate are rarely complicated by the relations of causation, i.e. by cause-effect relationships, meanwhile, this phenomenon is quite frequent in Russian; the spectrum of taxis meanings expressed by participles is narrower in Ossetian than in Russian.

Keywords: poem, interpretation, rethinking, agonality, narrator’s phenomenon, myth semantic.

The article critically reviews the traditional for Russian philology assessments of the poem «Enchanted Beauty» («Sahy Beauty») by B. Gurzhibekov, classic of the Ossetian literature. In contrast to the ideological interpretations in line with the discourse of social realism, a new interpretation of the work is presented as realization (perhaps at a subconscious level) of the ideas of the agonality of worlds — a universal motive in the ancient mythological systems. The reconstruction of the archaic reservoir of imagery allows discuss the plot core of the poem, sustained in the spirit of the Zoroastrian concepts of dualism, inherited in their turn from the ancient Iranian religion. It is about the recognition of two equal forces in the universe: the Good and the Evil, their struggle being the very condition for the existence of the universe. The agonistics of the personal sphere is represented in the poem by the confrontation between the Storyteller and Avdeu, characters with the ability to penetrate into all spheres of the universe, but with opposite or polar functions. Such an interpretation of the characters makes it possible to reveal the hidden symbolism of the narrator’s phenomenon in the work, and to give the status of a space battle to the competition of the rivals, outwarding it beyond personal motivation. Equally, the remote control motive by Avdeu of the girl from the tower makes it possible to adequately semanticize the title of the poem: the epithet «sahy» in its original title emphasizes not exceptional beauty, but the state of enchantment of the heroine. Everything else: questions of origin, generic roots of the proto-character, the line of love — that is positioned by researchers as freedom of expression of feelings, and even magic gifts (mirror, sword) are nothing but temporal stratifications, social and ethical reflections of the writer, superimposed on the structure of the ancient myth.

Keywords: regiolect, regionalism, local borrowing, regionalism, dialect, dialect, canism, barbarism, exoticism.

The recently intensified interest in the problems of philological regionalism, the subject of which is the language of the regions, characterized by a kind of territorial coloring, accounts for the relevance of the present study. Meanwhile, in the existing scientific literature, such concepts as regionalect, regionalism, have not received clear interpretation and are not clearly separated from related concepts. The question of the relation of the regional options language to the common language norm is not defined, nor the ratio of regiolect to the literary language, the composition of regiolect has not been identified. Many controversial issues are related to regionalism, which is a local borrowing and is functioning in the fabric of the work of art. In this sense, the relevance of this article is obvious. The aim of the article is to study the functions of the Caucasian and Ossetian regionalisms in A. Tsalikov’s novel «Brother Against Brother». The main research methods are descriptive, stylistic and cognitive. The scientific novelty of the work is to clarify the concepts of regionalect, regionalism, to reveal the functions of regionally marked units in the novel by A. Tsalikov «Brother Against Brother», in the comprehension of the creative individuality of the author, in the description of the structure of the narrative in the novel and the disclosure of ways of representation of local borrowings in it. The main results of the work are the following: the most important function of regionalisms in the novel, used for the romanticization of the Patriarchal Ossetian life in its opposition to civilization, leveling many national phenomena, destroying the people’s moral foundations, is revealed. It is this function of Ossetian regionalisms that is fundamental in the novel, because they most adequately convey the contents of the cognitive structure and contribute to the reconstruction of the national picture of the world; in addition, the thematic groups of this category of regional vocabulary are highlighted in the text of the work; the ways of their inclusion in the fabric of the novel are considered; their interaction with other elements of the text is analyzed. It is concluded that in addition to the transfer of the color of Ossetian life, broadcasting traditional Ossetian culture, the analyzed regionalisms serve to convey the emotional state of the characters, especially the main character, passionately protesting against the negative aspects of civilization and romanticizing the patriarchal way of life.

Keywords: Vsevolod F. Miller, Ossetic folklore, ethnographic essay, textological principles, unpublished manuscript.

The present article deals with the textological analysis and preparation for publication of unpublished folklore and ethnographic materials from Vsevolod F. Miller’s archival collections. The documents were found in the archives of the Orientalists of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and contain 398 handwritten pages with records of the texts by G. Shanaev, B. Gatiev, I. Kanukov, belonging to different genres of Ossetic folklore and ethnography. The manuscripts were delivered to Vsevolod F. Miller by Evgeniy G. Weidenbaum in May 1894. Materials have been submitted for publication in the «Collection of Information about the Caucasian mountaineers» however, like significant part on the facts of history, ethnography, and folklore of the Caucasus peoples, recorded on a large scale, they were not included in the main corpus of the collection. These manuscript contains texts both in Ossetic (with partial translations) and in Russian, including works of various genres: epic texts in Russian; fairy tales about animals in the Ossetic language (with translations into Russian); fairy tales in Russian (with no original variants); proverbs and sayings in the Ossetic language (with translation into Russian, and notes); riddles in the Ossetic language (with translations into Russian); ceremonial folk songs in the Ossetic language (with translations into Russian); ethnographic sketches in Russian (with endnotes). Since the «Collection of Information about the Caucasian mountaineers» was published in Russian, all the Ossetic materials were presented with the appropriate translations. Interlinear translation is used for some texts, and in some cases collectors supply the texts with their interpretation. Currently, work is underway to prepare and incorporate these materials into the modern research context.

Keywords: V. F. Miller, G. V. Baev, letters, the Ossetian language, Ossetian grammar.

The article is devoted to the history of the creation of the V. F. Miller’s work «Die Sprache der Osseten» («The Ossetian Language»). Published excerpts from the letters V. F. Miller to G. V. Baev on this issue in the period from 1901 to 1906 were extracted from the collections of the Scientific Archive of the North Ossetian Institute for Humanitarian and Social Studies. The selection of materials from the letters allows us to trace the work process of Miller on the manuscript of the book at a specified time, and assess creative participation of Bayev in it. For the history of scientific Ossetian studies, information about the beginning and process of a scientist’s work on the manuscript of the book, its goals and objectives, structure, new sections, preparation periods for printing, positive responses of foreign scientists to the book, which Miller shared with Baev. It is also important to bear in mind the help provided to the scientist at his request by Baev by supplying the latest official statistics on the total number of the Ossetians both in the Terek region and beyond it, which Miller subsequently placed in the Introduction to the book, in the section «Territory of distribution of the Ossetian language and its dialects». Noteworthy are the recommendations of Miller on the need to publish in Ossetia a practical grammar of the Ossetian language, in the creation of which he offered his assistance. The Russian-language version of the book published in 1962 by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR is considered. Published materials allow us to count the letters of Miller to Baev, one of the most important sources on the history of the creation by the scholar of the book «Die Sprache der Osseten» («Ossetian Language»).

Keywords: Caucasus, North Ossetia, civil war, national aristocracy, nobility, Кermenists, genealogy.

The article is devoted to the little-known and tabooed plot in the Soviet historiography — the demolition of the village of Karagach in 1918. Karagach, founded by privileged families in the second half of the XVIIIth century on the lowlands of the Digor Society of North Ossetia, was exposed to the red terror in its most severe manifestations, without any regard not only for mental attitudes and the common law of the people, but also for universal concepts of humanity. The event «forgotten» by history took place during the night of December 4, 1918, when the Bolshevik Kermenists attacked the village, levelled or burned the houses. Among the inhabitants of Karagach many were killed or wounded, including very old people, and the survivors were forced to seek refuge in other Ossetian communities outside Ossetia and Russia. The purpose of this study is to give a comprehensive and objective assessment of the historical event, to determine its political, social, demographic and other consequences, to trace the fate of the descendants of the immigrants through genealogical research. In this work, materials from the Central State Archive of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, field data, biographical and photographic materials of Karagach residents were used. A new source from the Scientific Archive of the North Ossetian Institute for Humanitarian and Social Studies — «Protocol of the elders of the Karagach parish of the 3rd section of the Vladikavkaz district of Aslanbek Dashiev February 1, 1919» is introduced into the scientific circulation, which contains a detailed description of the destruction of Karagach. As a result of the study, scientific assessment of the described event was given for the first time, which significantly complements the history of the Civil War in Ossetia, and also contributes to a more in-depth and updated study of the genealogy of the Ossetian families.