The article examines folk beliefs of the Kalmyks about somewhat sacral nature of the place where Donduk Dashi (popularly referred to as Balvatin Khan), the last Khan of the Kalmyks, was cremated in 1761; it narrates about presumed magic properties of the area which reportedly can cure livestock from epizootic diseases. 

The article investigates the semantics of a sheep’s head within Kalmyk wedding rites. A sheep’s head acts as an offering to diverse protector-deities, ancestors, and the sun, the three being sources of well-being and good life. Turko-Mongolian ceremonies to have included the throwing of a sheep’s head through a smoke hole (of the yurt) basically aimed to facilitate the newly married couple’s welfare, childbirth, and symbolized a blessing of the hearth. According to traditional beliefs, the sheep had a ‘sunny’ nature with corresponding purificatory, protective, and fructifying properties.
The research applies the comparative and problem methods. Besides, it turns to the semiotic approach when it comes to examine and interpret separate elements of rituals. It is concluded that the present-day depiction of a solar sign on the bride’s forehead well corresponds to beliefs about the sheep’s ‘sunny nature’, its sacrificial function in rituals of offerings, rebirth, and requests of protection, ceremonial ‘substitution’ of the individual. The offering of a slit sheep’s head to elderly people was related to the cult of ancestors and the concept of ‘opening’ some sacral channels to gain a most decent contact through the ceremonial activities.

The article analyzes materials collected by Ulyumdzhi D. Dushan (1892–1974) among the Kalmyks in the 1920s to 1930s, the former serving as a valuable folklore and ethnographic source. Being a professional physician to have received a classical European medical education, he displayed an interest in the traditional ethnic culture in its various aspects. First, he was attracted by the Kalmyk culture as a sum of traditional knowledge of the world and man; secondly, due to his professional duty, he could not help emphasizing those features of the traditional Kalmyk lifestyles that required certain intervention so as to be transformed ― everyday life and traditional mentality ― from Socialist perspectives.
The 2016 publication of U. D. Dushan’s works provides an opportunity to scrutinize into his research heritage which ― along with most valuable ethnographic descriptions of the material and spiritual culture of the Kalmyks, their pre-Buddhist religious ideas — contain his characteristics of separate folklore genres, narrative texts, and quite numerous examples of the aphoristic genres of Kalmyk folklore.

As for the multinational Soviet folkloristics, the 1940–1960s witnessed the two alternating trends, namely: excessive idealization of folk epic patterns was repeatedly replaced by their vulgar sociological interpretations that often resulted in that epic compositions would be excluded from the list of greatest monuments of the world epic heritage.
The national academic circles — with the support of some party and state organs — organized a number of folklore scientific conferences that finally re-established justice in evaluations of the epic monuments. Republican research institutions in co-operation with the Institute of World Literature published 20 epic monuments representing the rich epic heritage of different Soviet peoples. The article provides an overview of activities related to the preparation and publication of the heroic epics of the Kalmyks (Jangar) and Buryats (Gesar).

The paper examines one manuscript version of the famous ceremonial text Xara Kele that had been contained in the personal collection of the renowned Kalmyk Buddhist cleric O. M. Dordzhiev (Tügmüd Gavji). Formal characteristics of the text make it possible to date it back to the early or early-to-mid 20th century. It is noteworthy that there is a pencil note on the last page which indicates the name of the individual who had read and made use of the text when performing a ritual named ‘Cutting the Black Tongue Off’. According to the note, that gelong’s name was geshe Agvan Tabdan. The article clarifies the latter was a name used by one Kalmyk gelong ― who had received spiritual training but was later compelled to give up his monastic vows ― to sign his works and remarks. The astonishing thing is that the manuscript was discovered in Fund 15 (O. M. Dordzhiev’s collection) and not in Fund 8 that contains quite a vast collection of texts once possessed by E. B. Ubushiev.
The fact that a cleric’s name has been identified through a note he had made after a recitation of the text, on the one hand, indicates the name of that one cleric, and on the other hand, casts light upon lives and deeds of many other gelongs that even under the then atheistic policies kept performing certain rituals to support their compatriots and maintain the ancient tradition.

The article provides a fragmentary translation of the concise reference booklet The Lamp Dispelling the Darkness of Ignorance: an Explanation of One Version of the Kangyur compiled by the China Tibetology Research Center for a consolidated publication of the Kangyur (‘The Translation of the (Buddha’s) Word’), collected Tibetan Buddhist canonical texts. The data contained in Part 1 of the booklet deals with the time and circumstances that accompanied the creation of the main eight xylographic editions of the Kangyur, and describes the included sections and illustrations, being of undeniable interest to Tibetologists and Mongolists. 

The article deals with the Mongolian theme in works of the Kalmyk writer Mikhail Khoninov. The autobiographical aspect in the poet’s lyrics was determined by his army service in the Transbaikalia Military District on the Soviet-Mongolian border in 1939-1941, and memories of that period. His poems of the late 1930s, 1960s and 1970s convey the themes of friendship between the two countries and peoples, military and fraternal assistance of the Soviet Union to Mongolia in the history of the Revolution, wars, Socialist construction, and space exploration endeavors. The past, present and future unite the plots of the Mongolian theme in M. Khoninov’s lyrics. Mutual translations of Kalmyk and Mongolian poets demonstrate literary ties between the kindred cultures. 

The paper introduces into scientific discourse a document contained in Kalmykia’s National Archive which is a decision of the Zargo Court, a consultative organ affiliated to the executive office of the Kalmyk Khanate and endowed with administrative-judicial powers. It contains data about borders of seasonal nomadic relocations between uluses (subordinate communities) of the Kalmyk noyons (landlords) as of 1765. The document testifies the Kalmyks were actually occupying quite vast territories as pasture lands during the examined period. The source was investigated by historians that basically used its 18th-centiry translation. But like many other documents, it has remained virtually unknown to Kalmyk linguists. The Clear Script text is a precious source for further vocabulary and grammar studies of the 18th-century Kalmyk language.

The work identifies peculiarities of lexical compatibility inherent to adjectives denoting moral qualities and also evaluates some dictionary entries of this lexical group. Despite there are a number of published works dealing with adjectives, Kalmyk studies have yielded no work to have describes adjectives characterizing moral traits of an individual. The paper examines the adjectives denoting moral qualities and often to be combined with the words заң ‘character, temper’; седкл — ‘thought, meditation’; санан ‘thought, reflections’.

The article deals with the thematic group ‘Names of Cooking Wares and Utensils’ in the context of the creation of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Kalmyk heroic epic of Jangar (EDJ). The work reveals some peculiarities and distinct features of names of wares and utensils, examines the lexemes хәәсн ‘cauldron’, ааһ ‘bowl; cup’, шанһ ‘ladle’, and provides examples of concise dictionary entries with the mentioned lexical units acting as header words.
In general, names of cooking wares and utensils are poorly represented in the Jangar Epic. This is likely to have been determined by the nomadic lifestyle of the Oirats — ancestors of the Kalmyks — which required universal minimalism, including in household activities. The epic narratives contain no detailed descriptions of such wares or utensils, and to restore some missing distinct features during the compilation of corresponding definitions authors of EDJ turn to lexicographic, ethnographic, and other sources to clarify the meanings of certain words.

The article deals with the use patterns of participles as revealed by a case study of varying versions of the Kalmyk heroic epic of Jangar recorded in different periods. Participles play a special role in grammatical structures of Mongolic languages. In different positions they denote either processes, or a corresponding attribute, or a performer of the action. This is what actually distinguishes participles from other verb forms. The examined texts of the Jangar Epic vividly illustrate the structural variety of Kalmyk participles. Being efficient expressive means, attributive verb forms facilitate more comprehensive descriptions of events/situations and attach special dynamics to the latter.

The article contains a concise frequency ranking dictionary of Mongolian word forms ― a list representing a basic vocabulary of modern Mongolian. 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 ranking dictionary of word forms is represented in the form of a table structured acc. to decreasing values of parameter VIII (and increasing values of parameter IX respectively).