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Ya evaṃ veda... Кто так знает... Памяти Владимира Николаевича Романова
“Though it is not obligatory for me what is stated in the Qurʾān, I will get proof from it”: Third conversation between Elias, Metropolitan of Nisibis, and wazir Abu ’l-Qasim al-Maghribi The Book of Sessions (Kitāb al-maǧālis) of Elias of Nisibis is a remarkable example of the Arab-Christian literature of the 11th century CE which is still pending its full critical edition. The content of the book is the discussions between Metropolitan Elias (975–1046) and his Muslim vis-à-vis – wazir Abū ʾl-Qāsim al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī al-Maghribī (981–1027). This work demonstrates the intellectual contacts between the different religious traditions of medieval Arab culture in its flourishing age as well as characteristics of the Christian literature developed in the Syro-Mesopotamian region in that epoch. The present publication provides a critical survey of the treatise which is followed by a Russian translation of the third session. While working on the article and the translation, the author used manuscripts from the collections of Berlin and Aleppo.
In this article, I have made a textual analysis of different versions of the Buddhist story about the encounter between Siddhartha Gautama and king Bimbisara that are available to us in Indian languages. As a result, the existence of three independent traditions was discovered, within which different redactions of this story had been developing over centuries. Comparing these redactions we have made an attempt to establish their relative dating. Besides, this paper contains Russian translations of four different redactions of the story about the visit of king Bimbisara from Sanskrit and Pali.
The paper includes a translation of the ghazal _“Dil-am juz mihr-i mah-rūyān ṭarīq-ī bar-namīgīrad”_ (“My heart follows no other path save love of the moon-faced”. We prepared it for the second volume of the complete philological translation of the Divan (for the first volume, ghazals 1 ‒ 100 see [Hafiz 2012] in the _Literature_ to the article).
The introductory part contains some preliminary data on the given poem. Hafiz composed it as an ‘answer’ to the ghazal of Shah Shujaʻ, the ruler of Shiraz and the patron of the poet (regretfully the sources preserved only the opening two half lines of the ruler’s poem). The “pearls” or lines of the ghazal seem unstrung; it counts 14 beyts (almost twice the standard number), what enhances the effect of semantic disintegration. The poem serves as a good example of Hafiz’s signature poetic technique of associative and parallel montage of themes and images.
The Persian text of the ghazal (according to Qazvini‒Gani version) and its Russian prose equilinear translation is followed by the detailed commentary to each beyt of the poem. It contains some philological particulars about the wording and imagery and the arguments on the choice of a given interpretation. We also trace the main themes of the poem as we see them, one of them being the “futility of advice”, and the other ‒ “the futility of poetry”. The complex interplay of those two themes is what keeps the sequence of “disintegrated” lines together. It also highlights the great poet's overall message of “the weary feeling of the futility of words”.
Who was M.-B. Hadjetlaché after All, or the Need for Deceit Based on various archival and published primary sources, the paper reconstructs, in counterpoint to the common interpretations and some academic ones permeated with political and emotional conflicts of collective memory, a biography of M.-B. Hadjetlaché (a.k.a. Y. Kazi-Bek Akhmetukov, a.k.a. G. Ettinger, etc.; ca. 1868– 1929) — a Circassian writer, Muslim journalist, Russian adventurer and political double-dealer; new evidence of his Jewish origin is offered; his strategies of constructing his identity are analyzed. The main question is, to which extent and how the notion of deceit is applicable here: on the one hand, the actor builds up his image and life in vivid accordance with his self-narratives; on the other, those narratives contradict external sources, his actions, and intimations of his own awareness of his deceit. Shifting the perspective of who M.-B. Hadjetlaché was to what G. Ettinger had become, the author suggests analyzing his strategies on the swing between forgery and forging, deceit (imposture) and invention, and argues for the high investigative value of the notion of deceit in historical and cultural research. Taking Hadjetlaché as a trickster, uncovering, at each stage of his life, his manipulation of the invented identity on the border of “us” and “them,” used by him as a symbolic capital in his relationship with power — those ways of addressing deceit allow us both to examine the actor’s own need for deceit and go beyond the limits of the individual biography, revealing the vast cultural resources employed by himself and his environment as well, allowing the deceit to be implemented.
The article includes a first full translation into Russian of the 43th chapter from the “Memorial of God's Friends” (Taẕkirat al-awliyā), hagiographic compendium composed by Farid ad-Din ʻAttar in the 12th century. It is also the first output of the project on Russian translation and research of the _Taẕkirat al-awliyā_. The project is undertaken by the participants of the Joint Iranian Seminar (Institute of the Oriental and Classical Studies, RSUH; School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, RANEPA), with N. Chalisova as head of the Project.
The chapter gives the life story and sayings of Junayd Baghdadi (d. 910), who led the Sufi community in Baghdad and was one of the formative figures in the development of Sufi thought. ʻAttar collected the “facts” and legends on Junayd and his sayings from different sources and skillfully arranged them; Junayd’s story in the “Memorial of God's Friends” presents a model example of narrative patterns in Persian hagiographic life writing. The text of translation, prefaced by a short introduction, is provided with a commentary related to philological and cultural details.
The present catalogue contains abstracts for some 150 volumes, among which books, periodicals, miscellanies, published by the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the principal institute in Russia for academic research in all kinds of philosophical knowledge. These works, written by eminent Russian scholars, cover such fi elds as the history of Russian, Western and Oriental philosophy, ethics and aesthetics, synergetics and epistemology, social and political philosophy and concentrate on problems that have attained particular importance in the age of globalization and growth of national self-consciousness.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.