The goal of the project “Cultural universalities of verbal traditions of nations of Siberia and the Far East: folklore, literature, language” is to identify and study the cultural universalities of verbal traditions of the peoples of Siberia and the Far East in the systems of folklore, literature, and language. The project is carried out by the staff of the Laboratory of Siberian and the Far Eastern Verbal Cultures.

One of the general theoretical objectives of the project is to form a model of verbal culture, which would take into account, on the one hand, the interaction of folklore, literature and language within the literature of one ethnic group and, on the other hand, the invariant or prototypical cultural component of the verbal traditions of different ethnic groups.

Objectives of folklore studies

– To carry out field research of the current state of folklore traditions and study archival materials (Republics of Altai, Buryatia, Tuva, Khakassia, Irkutsk region, Kamchatka Territory).

– To compile a collection of field recordings, archival and published materials as a basic source of research on folklore traditions of indigenous (Altai, Buryat, Koryak, Tuvinian, Khakass, Khanty, Shorian) and migrant ethnic groups of Siberia and the Far East (Belarusians, Chuvash, Mordva); transcribe and translate folklore texts.

– To develop structural and semantic principles of identifying cultural universalities in folklore; to identify and study cultural constants in multi-genre verbal and verbal-musical folklore material of indigenous and migrant peoples of Siberia.

– To consider semantic elements ( actional, personal, object, spatial, temporal, verbal, musical, etc.) of cult, calendar, labor and family ceremonies in order to identify cultural universalities in the folklore traditions of indigenous (Altai, Tuvinians) and migrant (Belarusians, Chuvash, Mordovians) peoples of Siberia.

– To identify and classify the basic mythologemes through comparative material based on the study of the mythological prose of the Altai, Tuvinians and Koryaks.

– To reveal the textual mechanisms (plot context, structure) of realizing the mythological motif of therianthropy in different genres of the Siberian peoples (Ph. D. thesis).

– To study the genetic origins of the characters of the Khakas heroic epos, to identify the specificity of the image of epic heroes and female characters, to determine the functional roles of secondary characters (PhD thesis).

– To determine how far the typical places are interconnected with the plots of heroic tales of the peoples of Siberia.

– To identify the stable semantic features of the poetic formulas of the Khanty bear feast songs; to conduct a comparative and functional analysis of the chants of the bear songs.

– To determine the constant genre attributes of personal and family songs of Nymylans and Chavchuvens (coastal and reindeer Koryaks).

– To describe the linguistic peculiarities and genre system of the folklore of Siberian Germans, German Mennonites; to expand the online database of folklore texts in German dialects of Siberia; to provide a genre-stylistic description of Jewish Yiddish songs recorded in 2015–2017 in Siberia.

– To develop an electronic corpus of the folklore texts under study and publish the decoded materials on the online portal “Folklore of the peoples of Siberia”.

– To develop a structural-semantic data ontology “Cultural universalities of the peoples of Siberia and the Far East” in the aspect for the electronic portal “Folklore of the peoples of Siberia”.

– To markup folklore texts according to the parameters of the developed system of classification of cultural universalities (space, time, nature, man, deity, destiny, artifact, etc.).

– To develop a system for attributing electronic texts, a search engine, an interface and navigation tools for the portal; organize information search based on extra-linguistic data (genre, artist, place of recording, etc.).

– To prepare databases on the folklore of the Forest and Seyakha Nenets, Surgut and Kazym Khants; a corpus of literary texts in the Khanty (Surgut dialect) and Veps languages.

Objectives of literary studies

– To conduct a historical and comparative literary description and analysis of conceptual representations of the world and man in the literatures of indigenous peoples of Siberia and the Far East.

– To identify the sources of images of shamanic rites in literary works and the genesis of “shaman plots” in the literature of indigenous peoples of Siberia and the Far East.

– To analyze the means of artistic expression in the texts of E. Aipin, G. Keptuke, A. Nemtushkin and others, to explore the process of transformation of folklore images, scenes, motifs, the reflection of the specifics of the ethnocultural vision of the world and man in the literature of the indigenous peoples of Siberia and the Far East of the 20th century.

– To study the poetics of self-myth-making of N. M. Yadrintsev, G. D. Grebenshchikov, G. N. Potanin; to analyze the coding methods of “life texts” of Siberian writers through self-identification with known literary and poetic images; to explore the memoirs of G. N. Potanin as a documentary text.

– To analyze the local cultural constants in Russian literature of Siberia, including the myth about Siberia as a liminal space.

– To study the genre originality of the legends about icons in the Siberian texts of the 17th – the beginning of the 18th century; to conduct a textological study and prepare the early edition of “Legend on the apparition and miracles of Our Lady’s Icon of Balak in Tobolsk” for publication.

– To reconstruct the circle of the secular reading of the 18th century in the towns of Siberia through analyzing the descriptions of the manuscript collections of archives and scientific libraries and studying de visu the composition of Siberian collections.

– To analyze the epic topoi and consider the trends of modernization and resemiotization in the literary work of the 18 century “The Prince Archilabon’s Story”.

Objectives of studying the languages of indigenous peoples of Siberia

– To identify as much lexical material related to religious, mythological, ritual and other spheres in the languages of indigenous peoples of Siberia as possible and to present it in the form of dictionary entries.

– To determine the origin of the spiritual culture vocabulary of the peoples of Siberia, areal distribution of certain lexemes and their semantic transformation in the texts of different chronological sections.

– To describe the vocabulary revealed in terms of its representing the most important concepts and notions of the spiritual sphere, elements of the worldview of Siberian ethnic groups.

– To analyze the image of man, his lexical naming and other verbal ways of his characterization in the languages of the peoples of Siberia.

– To carry out a comparative experimental-phonetic study of rhythmic and melodic parameters of utterances with narrative and interrogative communicative settings in audio recordings of folklore texts in the Altai, Khakass and Tuvinian languages, to analyze the correlations of the pitch, intensity, and duration characteristics in the sound realizations of the oral speech units to determine the typological universals and unique intonational indicators.

– To identify the markers of synthesis level of verbal analytical constructions in oral epic works in the Shor, Khakass, and Tuvinian languages, to reveal the specifics of phonetic transformation realization in folklore texts against the background of modern literary languages.

Objectives of Russian language studies

– To enlarge the associative-verbal empirical resources (in the form of subcorpus or interface for the users of the Russian regional associative database SIBAS (Siberia and the Far East) in the Asian part of Russia and neighboring territories where the Russian population resides.

– To develop theoretical and methodological tools to optimize the empirical data of the Russian regional associative database with the help of computer technology for the needs of individual categories of users.

– To identify associative dominants and psychoglosses marking actual socio-communicative attitudes of the Russian linguistic personality in relation to individual verbal units on the material of associative-verbal network of Russians, Yakuts, and speakers of Russian living in northern cities of Kazakhstan using comparative and comparative analysis; to assess their stability and connection with the processes of civilization identification of Russians and Russian speakers as well as with the variability and changeability of the relevant units in the systems.

– To describe the system of morphological categories of the Russian language as an integral network permeating the entire vocabulary.

– To study the realization of morphological categories of the Russian language in different semantic classes of vocabulary and various types of syntactic constructions so as to identify the ethnocultural potential of Russian grammar based on methods that allow comparing the categorical and lexical semantics as forces to be combined within the word form actualized in speech.