Vol 19, No 2 (2022): NORTH CAUCASUS: THE MOUNTAIN OF LANGUAGES AND THE LANGUAGE OF MOUNTAINS

The North Caucasian region is called the Russian Babylon due to its polyethnicity, multilingualism, religious syncretism, ancient mountain ethical codes coexisting along with state institutions of self-organization. Compared to other locales, it still manages to preserve many archaic forms of socio-normative and spiritual culture, although here, too, the first signs of a systemic crisis due to globalization processes are already visible. According to the articles presented in this journal issue, one can judge the current state and prospects for the development of the national languages and literatures of the Abkhaz, Balkars, Dagestanis, Kabardians, Karachays, Chechens, South and North Ossetians. Philosophers, literary scholars, folklorists, linguists raise and try to solve many urgent problems related to oral folk art, the status of the Russian language in the region, mass and literary bilingualism, the quality of literary translation, ethno-gender stereotypes, intertextuality mechanisms, as well as the possibility of using digital technologies in modern philological research.

The article traces the milestones of the creative biography of the novelist, painter, graphic artist Khalilbek Musayasul, who left Dagestan in the twenties of the twentieth century. His book “The Land of the Last Knights” appeared in German in 1936, and reached his father’s house with a delay of sixty-three years. For the first time in Dagestan culture, the idea of artistic synthesis, which presupposes an organic combination of verbal and visual, declared itself. The three watercolors and twenty-six graphic drawings placed in the text created a special atmosphere of mutual pollination of the word and the brush, when the descriptiveness was translated into the language of the visual image and vice versa. An attempt is made to analyze the value-semantic complementarity of ethno-cultural identity and sensitivity to transcultural innovations, identity and cultural universals. Two notable novels in the twenties of the last century - “Table Mountain” by Y. Slezkin and “Smile of Dionysus” by K. Gamsakhurdia - depict a young Khalilbek, already a “European”, as stated in the first of them. The East and the West came together in his personality and creativity in the sense that Europeanism declared itself not in the loss of dissimilarity, but in the inclusion in the dialogue of supra-ethnic artistic ideas. Meditative autobiographical prose has absorbed not only ethno-uniqueness, but also worldview breadth: the mutual attraction of the hearth-house and the image of the world initiated the “elevation of the small”, which does not lose sight of “the whole”, because “he needs the whole, the whole world... ” - let us refer to the lecture “The Art of the Novel” by T. Mann, a contemporary and interlocutor of Khalilbek (in the photo of 1927 He sits in a Circassian between T. Mann and F. Rubo). At the same time, the confession story, describing rituals, customs, rituals, is focused on the resilience of tradition as a counteraction to the erosion of the cultural and genetic code. The cosmos of national life opens up in its primordial ambiguity, combining the psychomental warehouse and features of mountain etiquette with finely stylized mythological plots, with an unobtrusive resurrection of archetypes and ancient customs of clearly pre-Islamic origin. The spiritual founder of the “Land of the Last Knights” was in no hurry to write off the precepts of ancestors and traditional values according to the department of archival memory, continuing to find in them the core of a positive identity.

Fable artifabulas, which are transhistorical in nature, have many ethnocultural refractions in the literature of different peoples of the world. In this article, with methodological support on the works of I.G. Herder, G.D. Gachev, as well as contemporary Caucasian scholars, the author explores the specifics of the Kabardian fable, taken in the dialectical unity of its stable, archetypal constants and nationally determined contexts. By the example of the fables of K. Atazhukin, A. Dymov, B. Zhanimov, B. Kagermazov, P. Tambiev, B. Tkhamokov, M. Khakuasheva, P. Shekikhachev, T. Sheretlokov, A. Shomakhov, H. Elberdov the law of correlation between moral values declared by poets and the postulates of the Kabardian ethical code “Adyghe Khabze” is shown. Within the framework of historical poetics, the author demonstrates three-stage evolutionary process associated with the transition of fabulists from the practice of borrowing classical subjects to national adaptation, and then to the creation of original texts. Much attention is paid to the decoding of symbolic images.

The Russian academician G.D. Gachev in the middle of the 20th century put forward the theory of “accelerated development”, according to which the literary systems of minority peoples, which for a number of different reasons were delayed in their development, are able at one moment to join in a single world process and in a short time to catch up and overtake highly developed literature. In the presented article, the legitimacy of the Gachev theory is proved on the example of the North Caucasian postmodern literature, which has developed into a single school. Based on the novel by Dina Damian (a pseudonym of Madina Tlostanova) “I am a passer-by in your world”, it is shown how one “stormy genius” in the person of a Kabardian writer performs a dual task: it raises regional postmodernism to an unprecedented height, and at the same time enriches world literature with innovative poetics and a whole series of original philosophical ideas. The novel solves a number of other tasks related to clarifying the philosophical, historical, social, and aesthetic roots of postmodernism.

The article is devoted to the formation of foreign-Russian bilingualism in the education system of Kabardino-Balkaria. The relevance of the problem under consideration is due to the social need for regional bilingualism in a multi-national, multilingual, multicultural republic, which is the CBD, the stable mass character of bilingualism in which is predetermined by the coexistence, cofunctioning of Russian, Kabardian and Balkar languages. The purpose is to consider some trends in the development of bilingualism in the region, since education is the most significant and massively organized sphere of communication that influences the formation of a bilingual personality in a multiethnic and multicultural environment. The paper uses the method of retrospective analysis. Based on the study of the results of all-Union population censuses, which made it possible to trace the dynamics of the formation of foreign-Russian bilingualism, as well as legal and local acts of the Soviet and postSoviet periods that influenced the language situation, the features of the interaction of the Russian language and the languages of the titular peoples of the republic, the factors of the dominance of the Russian language in all functional areas.

The article deals with the role of scientific etymology in restoring the origin of the word. The historical patterns, nature, and nature of the changes, development, and improvement of the language are analyzed. Attention is paid to the process of restoring historical memory as a powerful tool of knowledge. The article deals with the etymological semantics of the formants of the case system, the genesis of the ergative system, the historical memory of the class indicators of Avar language in correlation with the materials of other Dagestan languages. The paper examines the inner essence of language development in a comparative aspect. The importance of the concept of language development and the reconstruction of the forms of language units in both diachronic and synchronic terms is noted.

The fact is that gender relations in the Caucasian ethno-social space are not only specific, but also undergo contradictory changes in the context of the general trends of modern Russian sociocultural transformation, requiring close scientific, primarily ethnological attention. However, ethnology in the region still remains under the influence of conservative ideas from the 1990s “on a return to the roots of culture, on the re-Islamization of culture”. In this difficult context, the barriers to the development of gender science in the space of Caucasian ethnic cultures are analyzed with maximum consideration of the characteristics of these cultures. On a wide range of facts and phenomena, the genderological features of the Caucasian ethnic cultures are revealed in detail (especially on the examples of the gender existence of the Adyghe ethnic groups). They are not properly studied, as well as the inconsistency of the stereotypes existing in the Russian discursive arena regarding Caucasian gender culture with facts and realities, which distances the attention of the centers of the country’s humanities from understanding ethno-gender issues. Possible (potential) prospects and horizons for the development of ethnic gender studies in the Caucasian regions are outlined. Considerable attention is paid to the particularly significant role of literary criticism (and philological science in general) in overcoming barriers to the development of gender science in the space of ethnic cultures. At the same time, it is argued that there are growing tendencies towards the formation of literary criticism as the leading science of ethnology, which is objectively facilitated by both the general trends of cultural transformation processes in modern Russia and the current conservative intentions of ethnology in the Caucasian regions.

One of the most important tasks facing the translator is adequacy of the translation. The relevance and topicality of the present study is due to the need of: 1) developing a unified approach to the choice of translation strategies and methods of transferring ethnospecifically coloured sacral onyms by means of the Russian and English languages; 2) describing and analyzing the methods of interptetation of Ossetian precedent sacral onyms. The subject of the research is presented by the semantic, structural and functional characteristics of sacral onyms, as well as extra-linguistic factors of interlingual communication that influence the choice of translation correspondences by means of the target languages. The sources of the illustrative material of the study are presented by text fragments taken from Internet resources and reflecting the representativeness of the analyzed precedent onyms in social communication. The methodological basis of the research is the synchronous principle of linguistic description, which contributes to identifying the peculiarities of the formation of translation correspondences in the context of modern ideas about the strategies of translation of the onymic segment of vocabulary. The complex nature of the research has led to the use of a diverse set of research methods (the method of description, classification and systematization of linguistic material according to certain criteria for processing research materials; comparative analysis of the correspondent texts in different languages; component analysis).The results of the research consist in the systematization of the methods of finding translation correspondences, in order to determine the algorithm for solving the problems facing the translator.

The article is based on the author’s hypothesis that the devalued “new time” Soviet novels of socialist realism actually contain valuable ethno-gender material. This position is theoretically substantiated and experimentally proved by the author as a result of the analysis of two historical and revolutionary novels “Murat” and “Northern Lights” by the Balkarian writer Minaldan Shavaeva. The main character Asiyat portrays the North Caucasian type of an emancipated woman who challenges patriarchal foundations and preaches the principle of “freedom of the heart”. Much attention is paid to related issues related to ethnocultural codes “kadar” (fate) “taukel” (soul is like a mountain), “cousin”, “leading woman”, “driven man”, “maiden braid”. In the context of gender transformation processes in the North Caucasus, the culture-forming role of the Russian language is also considered.