Доклады Международного конгресса ИИСАА. Т. 1

504 Proceedings of the International Congress on Historiography and Source Studies of Asia and Africa.Vol. I. 2020 Tsvetkova S. O. (FAAS, SPbU, St Petersburg, Russia) Folk Formulae in the Lyric Religious Poems by Mira Bai (1499‒1547) Summary : The style of the lyrics by Mira Bai (1499‒1547), the famous poetess and devotee of the Krishna bhakti cult in Northern India, should be characterised as “formulaic”. Her poems stand very close to the folk religious songs praising the god Krishna, which abound in formulae as a rule. The songs ( bhajans ) in Krishna bhakti, lyric and narrative as well, became a kind of emotional sacrifice of bhaktas to their beloved god. Thus, they were meant to express in a complete way the intense feelings of the devotee toward their deity; and the formulae were reckoned the proper expressive means for this, approved by the tradition. What distinguishes the authorial poetry of Mira Bai from these folk lyrics is her flair for arranging stylistic figures on the basis of the traditional folk formulae or idioms. The paper is concerned with the study of the stylistic techniques of the poetess, that is the analysis of a new functional role of the formulae in her poetic texts — of their stylistic application. The expressiveness of the traditional Indian folk formulae could wane with the course of time. The author uses these formulae and some idioms as “semantic blocks” to create vivid images of the emotions, she arranges them into stylistic devices like palilogy, parallelism, inversions, chiasmus, gradation, — thus intensifying their semantic and expressive power. These stylistic techniques include some composite devices producing stylistic effects of evocative emphasis, movement and emotional outburst. These techniques are characteristic of Mira Bai’s authorial style and can serve as criteria while authenticating some of the poems traditionally attributed to her. The poems‒songs traditionally attributed to Mira Bai, which had existed for a long time in oral form in the Indian folk culture, became subject to many alterations that obviously influenced their original language. Themanuscript collections of her texts known by now are dated differently and differ considerably in their contents; besides there is a lack of any textological information in the MSS concerning their origin. All this makes the task of their attribution very complicated. The stylistic characteristics peculiar to her poems discussed in this paper may prove to be of use in solving this problem. Keywords : Bhakti movement; Medieval Indian poetry; Medieval Krishna-bhakti poetry; lyrics of Mira Bai; emotional sacrifice in bhakti poetry; Mira Bai stylistic techniques; folk formulae.