The paper analyses the discourse on pan-Islamism (the perceived Islamic menace both to the ‘global' European civilization and the integrity of the Russian Empire) in Russian imperial structures (especially, the Ministry of the Interior) during 1910–1914. The discourse is considered as one of the institutionalized ways of constructing Russia's ‘own' Muslim other (along with the foreign one) and, simultaneously, as construction of an ‘internal enemy'. The key question considered in the paper is why the discourse preserved its productivity and explanatory force in spite of its instrumentalization revealed at the previous step of the analysis: the correspondence between the center and the local authorities and inter-ministerial conficts (analyzed, mainly, for Turkestan and Bukhara) show that it used to be manipulated according to situational needs. The complexity of the discourse's functions is suggested as an explanation of its force. Its Orientalism (where Muslims were seen as an organic cultural/racial whole) combined with conspiracy theory formed a channel for the spy-mania that would explode in the WWI years: the nationalizing, unifying trends countering imperial diversity made their common ground. Its instrumentalization was going on within the framework of the same myth. Yet in the interaction with the positive (but equally ‘Orientalist') modeling of the Empire's ‘loyal' Muslim subjects, ‘pan-Islamism' tended to be reinterpreted as a ‘revolutionary' political party, thus echoing the fears born in the Russian revolutionary context. Mass literature nourished the whole. Compensating for the frustrations of the eve of WWI, the complex seems to refect the offcials' vision of their own role as alienated from the population of the Empire and having but the intelligence service methods for controlling and governing it, while the colonial and domestic political orders were tightly intertwined.

The paper deals with the concept of sea in mathnavi — poems of a mystical and didactic nature by Farid ad-Din ‘Attar, a Persian Suf poet (XII–XIII centuries). Four poems with established authorship are considered. A synonymic row consisting of four lexemes with the meaning ‘sea', ‘ocean' has been analyzed: daryā, baḥr, qulzum, muḥīṭ. The paper focuses on direct and fgurative meanings of words portraying the sea's attributes, as well as on comparisons and metaphors, and parables based on those. It also shows the means that allow the author to use all the metaphorical potential of the notion of the sea in order to discuss tenets of the Suf doctrine and particularities of Suf meditative practice.

The paper deals with the concept of human dignity in the Persian-speaking world under the last Timurids and under the Safavid dynasty (15th–18th centuries). The concept is reconstructed on the basis of written sources from that time. I will try to defne the meaning of ‘dignity' and its place in the value system of the ‘men of the pen'. Two types of dignity can be distinguished in texts originating from the Persian-speaking region of the period. There is personal dignity, mainly concerning piety and professional skills and characteristics, and corporate dignity, concerning family and household members, place of origin, religious beliefs, spiritual leader, patron etc. Different kinds of threats to one's dignity and ways of defending oneself offered in the texts will be discussed in my paper.

The textualization of knowledge has produced numerous texts in Persian. These scholarly treatises (on astronomy and algebra, pharmacology and plant science, Suf teachings and the art of poetry, etc.) are undoubtedly among the most revealing testimonies regarding the medieval culture of Iran. The problem of their inclusion in the domain of literature is under discussion in the frst part of the article. From the point of view of their main function those works mostly fall into the category of informational and directive texts and thus (when viewed from a modern Western perspective) can be only considered as non-literature. In authoritative “histories of Persian literature” some treatises are discussed in the “Prose of the period” sections, with a focus on the content of the given book and its status, and without any special mention of its generic features. However, the tradition of composing treatises eventually developed a set of characteristics and conventions of textualization which could be considered as literary (elaborate and in some cases embellished language; narrative interpolations, stories, anecdotes, poems; rhetorical techniques of discourse; compositional structure in relation to a certain topic). When seen in the pre-modern Iranian perspective, the “expository” treatises, regardless of their literary merits, are a part of classical Adabīyyāt and form the very basis of refned education (adab). The topics exposed in treatises provided “educated” Persian poetry with clusters of “technical” imagery, and the patterns of scholarly reasoning found their counterpart in the poetic argumentation. In the second part of the article the hermeneutical use of the treatises is discussed. Popular calligraphic imagery serves as a good example here, since many poetic circumlocutions fnd their explanation in treatises on calligraphy. The expository texts are by no means detached from high literature; moreover, they prove important for attaining a better understanding of “presentational” genres of poetry and prose. An appendix to the article includes a translation of a small textbook on calligraphy by Halil Tabrizi (16th century).

In this paper, I discuss the history of translation of Heian era literature in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia. It is demonstrated that Soviet attitudes to Japanese literature to a
signifcant degree were affected by the political trends of the epoch. Thus, while in the 1920s Japanese culture was considered to be unique and exotic, in the 1930s Soviet philologists rather tended to regard Japan as a subject of Marxist theory and Japanese aristocratic literature was appreciated as “realistic”. After the Second World War, there was a strong tendency to consider classical Japanese poetry as a form of folk culture. Conversely, in the 1970s Japanese literature became highly appreciated by Russian intellectuals because they considered Japan of the Heian epoch as an “ideal dreamland”, free of false ideology and politicization.

The paper discusses the literary monument Shasekishū (“Sand and Pebbles Collection”, 1279–1283) as a source for studies in Japanese Kamakura Buddhism in its practical dimension. By examining the setsuwa tales in this collection, we may pose and answer questions about the role of various buddhas and bodhisattvas in Japanese Buddhist traditions, about the doctrinal bases and ritual practices of various cults. Discourses about the essence of this or that revered being in this collection are mixed with stories about miracles which the Buddha or Bodhisattva revealed in Japan, about miraculous statues, etc. Specifc cases studied in this article are the Dainichi, Yakushi, Amida, Miroku, Kannon and Jizō cults. The author of Shasekishū, describing the advantages of different cults, consistently denies claims by any of them to exclusivity (especially in the case of Amidaism). The paper continues the study that was previously published as [Trubnikova 2016].

The paper presents a Russian translation and a brief analysis of Remembrance of Jaʻfar Sadiq from the Persian Suf anthology Memorial of God's Friends by Farid al-din Attar. Jaʻfar Sadiq, the sixth Shiʻi imam, founder and eponym of the Ja‘fari school of jurisprudence, played an important role in the Suf tradition. The Sufs revered him as a member of Prophet Muhammad's family (ahl-i bayt) and, through his persona, connected their own tradition of piety with the age of the Prophet and his companions. Sufs also considered him a bearer of hidden knowledge (‘ilm al-bāṭin), an inimitable interpreter (mufassir) of the Quran and claimed to be his spiritual descendants by including him in Suf lineages. These virtues became the main features of Ja‘far Sadiq's hagiographic portrait in the Persian Suf tradition.

The paper presents the frst Russian translation of the entire text of volume 398 of the Extensive Records of the Taiping Era, a collection of supernatural and other marvelous stories, including thousands of stories covering the chronological span from Han times to the middle of the 10th century. The volume is entitled “Stones” and contains thirty-seven entries concerning various unusual stones and two entries about a walking hill-slope and singing sands. The main contributors to the text of the volume were Dai Fu (VIIIth century), author of the “Wide World of Marvels” (Guang yi ji), and Xu Xuan (Xth century), author of the “Accounts of Inspecting Spirits” (Ji shen lu).

In this paper, we offer a new Russian translation of and an extensive commentary on the frst chapter of “New Words” (Xīn yǔ), a Hàn-era treatise usually attributed to the intellectual Lu Jia. This text, frequently overlooked in the general perspective of Hàn philosophy, is actually of fundamental importance to the entire philosophical tradition of the Hàn period. Primary attention is paid to the commentary, compiled by the authors as a side project in the course of their work on a new type of dictionary for Classical Chinese; defned as having a “linguo-philological” nature, it combines elements of corpus analysis with linguistic analysis that takes into account the current state of knowledge of historical phonology, grammar, and lexicology of Old Chinese.