The Path of Japanese Setsuwa Prose in Soviet and Russian Japanese Studies

The purpose of this article is to highlight the history of translations into Russian and the study of works of the Japanese genre of setsuwa in Soviet and Russian Japanese studies. The setsuwa genre is a short-form parable story with a didactic ending, which is based on an entertaining story from the life of Buddhist saints, righteous monks, hermits, as well as stories about the fall, karmic retribution, and the main ideas of Buddhism. Collections of short Buddhist stories appeared in Japan along with the spread of Buddhism; the earliest collections of Buddhist setsuwa date back to the turn of the 8th–9th centuries. By the 11th century, there appears a division in the setsuwa genre between purely Buddhist and secular setsuwa, due to which purely Buddhist stories lose their harsh didactic coloring and acquire new plots and heroes: those of court anecdotes, funny cases with commoners, stories about the supernatural and magic. Collections of setsuwa, especially Konjaku Monogatari-shū (今昔物語集Tales of Times Now Past, 12th century) and Uji Shūi Monogatari (宇治拾遺物語, Tales Collected from Uji, 13th century), were very popular among the Japanese, but they officially entered the collection of classical Japanese literature in the first half of the 20th century only due to the efforts of the reformer of Japanese scholarship Haga Yaichi. By the 1970s, in European Japanese studies, there were already full or partial translations and studies of such monuments of setsuwa as Konjaku Monogatari-shū and Uji Shūi Monogatari, but, in Soviet Japanese studies, only the first timid steps were taken. The ideas of Marxism penetrated all spheres of academic life, and translation and publishing activities were no exception. In the early Soviet period, the preparation of translations of works of the setsuwa genre, given the strong religious and magical component of its plot, was unthinkable and ideologically “dangerous”. In chronological order, the article highlights the main stages of the study, translation, and popularization of the setsuwa genre by such Soviet and Russian Japanese studies scholars as V. Sanovich, T. Red’koDobrovolskaya, G. Sviridov, A. Meshcheryakov, N. Trubnikova, D. Kiknadze.