Enfranchisement Letters as a Genre of 18th-Century Kalmyk Official Writing

Abstract

The National Archive of Kalmykia houses multiple official Clear Script texts. Being different in terms of content, structure and format, the documents attest to that the genre diversity of Kalmyk official writing used to be large enough. The paper examines one such text that can be identified as a separate genre - letter of enfranchisement once granted to common people by their landlords. Materials. The work analyzes the text of an enfranchisement letter issued by the Dor- bet noyon (‘land and war lord’) Tsenden Dorji to manjik (‘lay priest’) Gaban Sharap. Goals. The article seeks to describe and introduce into scientific discourse the text of the document containing both historical and linguistic research data. Results. It is concluded that the letter is a standard text of the genre of 18th-century Kalmyk official writing. In this regard, it is essential to further investigate similar texts to reveal the impact of Russian records management patterns.