In this article, the author addresses the question of how the Chinese novel about the extraordinary reflects the religious ideas and beliefs of the people of China. To do this, the paper considers a number of translations of Chinese xiaosho, made by the Harbin orientalist I.G. Baranov who united them into the cycle “Chinese true story”. The purpose of the study is to identify the main ethno-religious concepts that appear in the stories selected and translated by Baranov and analyze them. The material for the study was the cycle “Chinese true story”, published by I.G. Baranov in 1915 in the Harbin ethnographic periodical “Monitor of Asia”. Within the framework of this article, a number of aspects of the religious picture of the world of the Chinese people, manifested in the “Chinese true story” are singled out and analyzed: shamanism, totemism, mythological images, belief in werewolves. The author comes to the conclusion that I.G. Baranov deliberately selected texts on the basis of their representativeness in terms of the manifestation of ethno-cultural and ethno-religious concepts.
Key words: Russian Harbin, oriental studies, ethnography, China, folk religion, xiaoshuo, short story about the extraordinary, “Chinese true story”, shamanism, totemism, mythology, fox, skinshifter
DOI: 10.22250/20728662_2022_4_169
About the author
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Olga E. Tsmykal – PhD (Philology), Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature and World Arts, Senior research fellow at the Laboratory of Frontier Studies, |