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This book re-examines the origins of modern Mongolian nationalism,
discussing nation building as sponsored by the socialist Mongolian
People's Revolutionary Party and the Soviet Union and emphasizing
in particular the role of the arts and the humanities. It considers
the politics and society of the early revolutionary period and
assesses the ways in which ideas about nationhood were constructed
in a response to Soviet socialism. It goes on to analyze the
consequences of socialist cultural and social transformations on
pastoral, Kazakh, and other identities and outlines the
implications of socialist nation building on post-socialist
Mongolian national identity. Overall, Socialist and Post-Socialist
Mongolia highlights how Mongolia's population of widely scattered
seminomadic pastoralists posed challenges for socialist
administrators attempting to create a homogenous mass nation of
individual citizens who share a set of cultural beliefs, historical
memories, collective symbols, and civic ideas; additionally, the
book addresses the changes brought more recently by democratic
governance.
This book re-examines the origins of modern Mongolian nationalism,
discussing nation building as sponsored by the socialist Mongolian
People’s Revolutionary Party and the Soviet Union and emphasizing
in particular the role of the arts and the humanities. It considers
the politics and society of the early revolutionary period and
assesses the ways in which ideas about nationhood were constructed
in a response to Soviet socialism. It goes on to analyze the
consequences of socialist cultural and social transformations on
pastoral, Kazakh, and other identities and outlines the
implications of socialist nation building on post-socialist
Mongolian national identity. Overall, Socialist and Post-Socialist
Mongolia highlights how Mongolia’s population of widely scattered
seminomadic pastoralists posed challenges for socialist
administrators attempting to create a homogenous mass nation of
individual citizens who share a set of cultural beliefs, historical
memories, collective symbols, and civic ideas; additionally, the
book addresses the changes brought more recently by democratic
governance. Chapters 2 and 3 of this book are freely available as
downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under
a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives
(CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Over the course of the twentieth century, Mongolian life was
transformed, as a land of nomadic communities encountered first
socialism and then capitalism and their promises of new societies.
The stories collected in this anthology offer literary snapshots of
Mongolian life throughout this tumult. Suncranes and Other Stories
showcases a range of powerful voices and their vivid portraits of
nomads, revolution, and the endless steppe. Spanning the years
following the socialist revolution of 1921 through the early
twenty-first century, these stories from the country's most highly
regarded prose writers show how Mongolian culture has forged links
between the traditional and the modern. Writers employ a wide range
of styles, from Aesopian fables through socialist realism to more
experimental forms, influenced by folktales and epics as well as
Western prose models. They depict the drama of a nomadic population
struggling to understand a new approach to life imposed by a
foreign power while at the same time benefiting from reforms,
whether in the capital city Ulaanbaatar or on the steppe. Across
the mix of stories, Mongolia's majestic landscape and the people's
deep connection to it come through vividly. For all
English-speaking readers curious about Mongolia's people and
culture, Simon Wickhamsmith's translations make available this
captivating literary tradition and its rich portrayals of the
natural and social worlds.
Politics and Literature in Mongolia (1921-1948) investigates the
relationship between literature and politics during Mongolia's
early revolutionary period. Between the 1921 socialist revolution
and the first Writers' Congress held in April 1948, the literary
community constituted a key resource in the formation and
implementation of policy. At the same time, debates within the
party, discontent among the population, and questions of religion
and tradition led to personal and ideological conflict among the
intelligentsia and, in many cases, to trials and executions. Using
primary texts, many of them translated into English for the first
time, Simon Wickhamsmith shows the role played by the literary arts
- poetry, fiction and drama - in the complex development of the
'new society', helping to bring Mongolia's nomadic herding
population into the utopia of equality, industrial progress and
social well-being promised by the Mongolian People's Revolutionary
Party.
Over the course of the twentieth century, Mongolian life was
transformed, as a land of nomadic communities encountered first
socialism and then capitalism and their promises of new societies.
The stories collected in this anthology offer literary snapshots of
Mongolian life throughout this tumult. Suncranes and Other Stories
showcases a range of powerful voices and their vivid portraits of
nomads, revolution, and the endless steppe. Spanning the years
following the socialist revolution of 1921 through the early
twenty-first century, these stories from the country's most highly
regarded prose writers show how Mongolian culture has forged links
between the traditional and the modern. Writers employ a wide range
of styles, from Aesopian fables through socialist realism to more
experimental forms, influenced by folktales and epics as well as
Western prose models. They depict the drama of a nomadic population
struggling to understand a new approach to life imposed by a
foreign power while at the same time benefiting from reforms,
whether in the capital city Ulaanbaatar or on the steppe. Across
the mix of stories, Mongolia's majestic landscape and the people's
deep connection to it come through vividly. For all
English-speaking readers curious about Mongolia's people and
culture, Simon Wickhamsmith's translations make available this
captivating literary tradition and its rich portrayals of the
natural and social worlds.
The life of the Sixth Dalai Lama does not end with his supposed
death at Kokonor in November 1706, on the way to Beijing, and an
audience with the Manchu Emperor Kangxi. This book, the so-called
Hidden Life, presents a very different Tsangyang Gyamtso, neither a
louche poet nor a drinker, but a sober Buddhist practitioner, who
chose to escape at Kokonor and to adopt the guise of a wandering
monk, only appearing some years later, after many fantastical and
mystical adventures, in what is today Inner Mongolia, where he
oversaw monasteries and lived as a Buddhist teacher. The Hidden
Life was written by a Mongolian monk in 1756, ten years following
the death of the lama, his spiritual teacher, whom he identifies as
Tsangyang Gyamtso, and in whose identity as the Sixth Dalai Lama he
clearly has complete faith. However, as one might imagine, there is
nowadays no agreement among the wider Tibetan, Mongolian and
Tibetological scholarly community as to whether this man was a
charlatan or deluded, or whether he was indeed the Sixth Dalai
Lama. The text is divided into four parts. The first part gives an
account of the background and birth of the Sixth Dalai Lama, while
the opening section of the second part (which is in direct speech,
dictated by the lama) continues on, through the political intrigue
in Lhasa at the end of the seventeenth century, to the lama's
escape at Kokonor. The remainder of the second part consists of a
visionary narrative, in which the lama travels through Tibet and
Nepal, and in which he encounters divine figures, yetis, zombies
and a man with no head, all of which is presented as fact. The
third and longest part is an account of the final thirty years of
the lama's life, and his activity in Mongolia as an influential
Buddhist teacher, including a lengthy and moving description of his
death. The final part includes a list of his students and, most
interestingly perhaps, a theological and philosophical
justification for the coexistence of the Sixth and Seventh Dalai
Lamas.
The End of the Dark Era is the first book of Mongolian poetry to be
published in the United States, and one of the few avant-garde
collections to have come from the vast steppes of Mongolia. Poet
Tseveendorjin Oidov, who is also one of Mongolia's most renowned
painters, traverses the Mongolian dreamscape in poems populated by
horses, eagles, and a recurring darkness that the poet dissipates
with his startling descriptions and abiding empathy. The short
poems of the book's second half are accompanied by 32 of Oidov's
abstract line drawings.
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