Information about the author:
Vladimir L. Klyaus, DSc in Philology, 1) Head of Folklre Department, А.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 а, 121069 Moscow, Russia; professor, 2) Head of the Department of Historical and Philological Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences - Deputy Academician-Secretary of the Department of Historical and Philological Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences for Scientific and Organizational Work, 3) Russian State University for the Humanities, Miusskaya sq. 6, 125993 Moscow, Russia.
Acknowledgments:
The reported study was funded by RFBR, project number 21-112-00262, Not for Sale
Abstract:
The book Russian Folklore on the Hills of Manchuria is the result of many years of field research by the author aimed at recording and studying the folklore of Chinese Russians living in the urban district of Ergun, Hulunbuir aimag, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China, located on the border with the Trans-Baikal region of the Russian Federation. The older generation of Chinese-Russian “mestizos” preserved the language and folk repertoire of their Russian mothers and grandmothers who came to China after the Civil War (1918-1922) and before the era of rapid socio-political and economic change in the USSR.
Russian Folklore on the Hills of Manchuria presents tales, mythological stories, legends, songs, charms and “chastushki” of the Chinese Russians in Manchuria for the first time. This is the most complete collection of their folklore, which for almost a century has existed in isolation from the maternal tradition of Eastern Transbaikal. Developing independently and assimilating foreign ethnic elements, this tradition has nevertheless preserved genre forms characteristic of the oral literature of Russian inhabitants of the Transbaikal Region of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries.
The book is intended for folklorists, linguists, ethnologists, ethno-musicologists, culturologists, and researchers of the Russian-Chinese borderlands.