The article investigates activities performed by the Astrakhan Governors, V. Tatishchev and N. Beketov, both having been somewhat earliest conductors of the mid-18th century resettlement policy. It examines ideas, projects, and actual efforts undertaken by the two executives aimed to establish and develop settlements; special attention is paid to their impact on the formation of resettlement policies in South Russia. Their work was significantly hampered by underpopulation, harsh weather conditions, open and indefinite borders, lack of military and human resources. Tatishchev and Beketov laid the main principles of resettlement policies in Astrakhan borderlands that basically ― for the government for many years to come ― consisted in peopling territories adjacent to key transport corridors, wide involvement of military servants and diverse nationals as human resources for such resettlements. The historiographic basis of the research is constituted by published materials and documents of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts.

The paper investigates archival materials and examines the beginnings of the Bagatsokhurovskaya Party Organization. It is found that the Bagatsokhurovsky Ulus RCP(B) Committee had been established on 26 October 1918 as an affiliated organ of the Ulus Executive Committee. The party cell was headed by Khodzha Otkhonov and Kebyuda Dalgaev, revolutionaries and active partners of the Soviet regime in Kalmykia. The work concludes the Bagatsokhurovsky Uezd Party Committee was conducting socio-political work in rural territories, paying special attention to activities by cooperative associations and peasant mutual aid committees. Still, activities of the considered party organization were characterized by a number of gaps, such as weak involvement of workers and farm-hands, poor management of Komsomol organizations, weak control over works undertaken by poors, insufficient antireligious propaganda among Communists and Komsomol members. The bulk of the gaps were also inherent to other party organizations.

The article examines the institution of dowry in wedding rites of the Kalmyks. Traditionally the composition of the dowry was largely determined by the groom’s party, close relatives and fellow-villagers of the bride and her parents. A certain set of dowry elements was conditioned by the nomadic lifestyles and traditional beliefs. The ceremonies of carrying dowry away and bringing it into the groom’s home were essentially apotropaic. Contemporary wedding rites retain the principle dowry be negotiated by relatives, contain all ceremonial elements required for the bride to safely join the circle of her sisters-in law, e.g., the delivery of the ‘bride’s chest’. So, even nowadays dowry serves to materially identify a new status of the newly married couple.

The article discusses the development of ethnic trends in Kalmykia’s entrepreneurial public catering system. It suggests that the current demand for ethnic elements is determined by the topical issues of national revival, tourism development, and competitive activities in general. The factors actually lead to certain borrowings from national cuisines of related peoples and somewhat mythologization of ethnic culture aimed to satisfy wants of the consumer through attempts to delineate links between sub-ethnic peculiarities — including economic and cultural ones — and products inherent to the modern globalized food culture. Such modernization manifests itself in the idea to attach new meanings that could thus create new ‘memorable functions of the dish’.

The article investigates two important questions, namely: whether N. K. Yalatov was a traditional taleteller and whether the Yangar (Alt. Jаҥар) authored by the former is an Altaian epic. The provided arguments emphasize Yalatov’s taletelling skills and contest the long-lived idea that the bilingual Altaians had borrowed this epic from taletellers of western Mongolian tribes. Despite all the similarities and differences between the two epics, the paper suggests that the Yangar belongs to the Altaian oral folklore tradition, though it is difficult to reveal the actual relations between the Oirat Jangar and the Altaian Yangar without comprehensive comparative studies.

The article examines genre characteristics of a work by A. Taiva published in the form of a heroic fairy tale. The text is inspired by the famous oral and written versions of The History of Uneker Torliqtu Khan. Analysis of the form and contents of the poetic text revealed that it cannot be related to folklore. The work is a literary fairy-tale poem with typical features created on the basis of existing oral and written versions of the text.

The article considers some little-known manuscript songs of the Bagatsokhurovsky Jangar epic cycle contained in the Archive of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (Russian Academy of Sciences), Scientific Archive of the Russian Geographical Society, and Manuscript Collection of the Faculty of Asian and African Studies (St. Petersburg State University). The textological analysis of the little-known manuscripts never to have been introduced into wide scientific discourse shows those are ‘clean manuscript copies’, i. e., copies of somewhat ‘field manuscripts’ authored by different researchers.

The paper investigates plot АА 910 ‘Wise Advice’ in Kalmyk fairy tales. Quite a number of ethnic fairy-tale traditions contain a plot about five twigs to symbolize friendship and some disagreement accommodated through wise advice from an old man. The mentioned folklore plot is universally referred to as a household one.

The article analyzes a small work of the Finnish scholar G. J. Ramstedt Torgutische Lieder published by Pennti Aalto, a student of the latter, in 1962. Those are field materials collected by G. J. Ramstedt during his 1905 linguo-folklore expedition sanctioned by the Imperial Academy of Sciences that form the basis of the book. The linguist was able to record six songs from Xinjiang Torghuts. The paper draws parallels between the songs of China’s Torghuts and their suggested versions that used to exist among the Torghuts of Kalmykia. 

The article examines the image of the horse depicted in a number of archival materials. Being a thinking being, the horse has always been of interest to both Russian and foreign scholars. And it is definitely integral to the Kalmyk nomadic culture. The horse is constantly praised in Kalmyk songs and the heroic epic of Jangar. It also occupies a prominent place in different genres of ethnic folklore, acting as a devoted friend and aid. In proverbs the horse is often associated with male humans. The paper narrates about distinctive marks (Kalm. шинҗс) and curative powers of the horse.

The work clusters with studies that describe combinatorial properties of Kalmyk adjectives, the source materials being those of the Kalmyk National Corpus and the Kalmyk heroic epic of Jangar.
The article studies lexical co-occurrence of the adjectives šürǖn ‘harsh, rough’ and xatū ‘hard, firm’. The study reveals that the range of their lexical compatibility is quite wide. These adjectives co-occur with nouns of certain lexical-semantic groups, including ones denoting individuals, animals, natural phenomena, military actions, bladed weapons, and somatisms, etc. The words šürǖn and xatū are similar in that both the adjectives are basically used in figurative meanings to characterize external displays (look): šürǖn xӓlǟcᵉ ʻstern lookʼ, xatū xӓlǟcᵉ ʻfirm lookʼ. The most frequent combinations are those with nouns denoting ‘speech’, ‘voice’, ‘word’.
When it comes to investigate co-occurrence of Kalmyk adjectives, it is necessary to take into account some national specifics: certain difficulties may arise during translation, since co-occurrence patterns for Kalmyk and Russian adjectives differ, and therefore it is difficult enough to choose equivalent words. A detailed study of the co-occurrence of adjectives allows a deeper identification of their semantics, extends their meanings.

The article describes inflectional types of Kalmyk verbs required for large-scale automatic text processing. Special attention is paid to differentiating features of word-forming, form-building, and inflectional affixes within the Kalmyk language. The results of the study aiming to delineate certain Kalmyk morphological paradigms are essentially preliminary, and shall be clarified and supplemented as the scope of source materials (i.e., both the word-list and number of language facts to be discovered throughout texts to be investigated) increases. Still, the already discovered inflectional clusters have made it possible to create a morphological analyzer for the Kalmyk National Corpus. So far, a total of 11 verb inflectional types have been identified, the later containing insignificant differences. The groups are virtually different in causative formation. The paper is unique to contain a number of variants of the causative affix: -ул, -һ, -х, -лһ. Verb forms are basically developed with the aid of same affixes, e. g., mode forms Pass, Soc, Recp; aspect forms Dur1, Dur2, Compl; indicative forms Pres, Progr, Evd, Pst, Rem; oblique-mode forms Impr, Juss1, Opt, Juss2; adverbial participial forms Cond, Term, Succ, Prel, Purp, Conc, Prog, Ipfv, Ant, Mod; participial forms Pass, Pros, Pres, Mom, Hab, Perf, Fut.
All the inflectional verb types experience changes related to vowel harmony and morphonological sequences at joints of stems ending with vowel sounds and affixes beginning with vowel sounds — this gives rise to inter-fixations which are generally typical for the Kalmyk language. Besides, all verbs witness characteristic morphotactical interchanges, such as -чана / -җана in (present) progressive time, and -ч / -җ in past resultative time and syndetical adverbial participles. Moreover, there are morphonological interchanges in the iterative and apprehensive. The latter witnesses the interchange -вза / -ува before the consonant к and л, which is explained by Kalmyk sound compatibility patterns respectively. When it comes to develop iterative forms to verb stems ending with -г, -р, -рǎ, -с, -сǎ, -сǎ, -дǎ, -л, there emerges the inter-fixation -х-, -һ-.

The article provides an overview of grammatical classes of word forms of basic Mongolian lexemes, the word forms being characterized in terms of frequency use. The General Corpus of Modern Mongolian (Rus. GKMYa) served as a source of data to calculate frequencies of respective word forms. A most distinctive feature of the dictionary is that the introduced items have been structured categorially and semantically. The latter shall contribute to resolve further typological tasks with respect to world languages, i. e., it is reckoned to secure potential typological compatibility of the dictionary with similarly structured dictionaries of other languages. The work is based on principles of quantitative Mongolistics developed by the author in a number of preceding papers. So, the article provides 454 basic modern Mongolian word forms applied within GKMYa-1a, the absolute frequency of use exceeding 255 ipm and the relative one exceeding 220 ipm respectively. The word form dictionary is shown in the form of a table gradated by a grammatical class of a respective word form (grammatical classes listed alphabetically).

The article introduces into scientific discourse an unfinished anonymous Kalmyk-Russian dictionary. The dictionary was published by The Don Eparchial Bulletin (Rus. Donskie eparkhial’nye vedomosti) in 1871 and 1875. It is supplemented with comments of authors of corresponding publications. In terms of orthography, the translations have been brought into line with respective rules of modern Russian. The paper examines the applied compiling tecnhiques, analyzes dialectal characteristics of words, etc. The analysis gives ground to make some concusions regarding the author’s persosnality and those of his informants, namely, 1) the dictionary maker was not a professional linguist as evidenced by the inconsistency of dictionary entries, 2) the former was definitely a native of the Don Region, supposedly of Cossack background, since quite a number of the included Russian-language equivalents are lexemes typical for Southern Russian, 3) the header words contain no lexemes of the Buzawa dialect though the word-list includes words of both the Dorbet and Torghut dialects of the Kalmyk language.