Book
Kullanda Sergey, Pogrebova M., Raevskiy D.
Visual Folklore. Poetics of Scythian Animal Style
Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Москва, 2016, 191 p.
2nd improved ed.
The idea to consider the Scythian animal style as a kind of analogue of the oral tradition was substantiated and developed by D.S. Raevskiy. Unfortunately, the final text has been already compiled without him, because of that the book has much lost. Nevertheless, the authors hope that they succeeded in bringing to the readers the main concept and proving its right to exist. The problem of Scythian animal style is considered in relation of Scythians’ belonging to Iranian languages and in broader scale to Indo-Iranian peoples. Original linguistic materials and narrative sources have been used for this purpose. The authors come to the conclusion that Scythian animal style as an integral phenomenon was formed in the Western part of Eurasian cultural continuum under the influence of West Asian art. At the same time, the canons of this style were common with the poetic language of Indo-Iranian balladeers. This fact facilitated easy perception of the style by the Iranian peoples related to Scythians and made it widespread. The authors devote this book to a prominent Russian scientist E.A. Grantovsky (1932 – 1995). He was an expert in Iranian studies and Antiquity, a specialist in archaeology and comparative-historical linguistics. None of the researchers can come near with him regarding his knowledge of Scythian sources.