This article is devoted to the Manden Charter (West Africa). The Manden Charter, according to tradition, was adopted in 1236 in Kurukan Fuga (Mali). It is an oral document that has undergone the influence of time during the transmission of the text among generations of griots; it is a set of norms that was created to organize the Mali empire. The Charter itself is a reconstruction from epic sources, in which several griots from Guinea and Senegal participated at once. The article presents a complete translation of the Charter, the comparison and analysis of its several versions from the griots Siriman Kuyate and Karamo Adam Diabate. While the Kuyate’s version of the Charter is considered to be “official”, the Diabate’s version is more credible. The analysis of the articles allows us to conclude that a part of the document may well be qualified as a declaration of new world order in the Mali Empire, while the other part of the document is a folklore addition to it. Today, it is especially important to record all references to traditional texts or knowledge, since attempts to change history, making it more “humane” and “modern”, can be traced in Africa at all levels.

The article is devoted to the texts and audio records of the SartKalmyk folklore. The Sart-Kalmyks are among the least studied Mongolian peoples living in the settlements of Kyrgyzstan. The first examples of oral folk art of the Sart-Kalmyks can be found in the manuscripts written by the Russian Mongolian scholar A.V. Burdukovin 1929, as well as in the notes made by K.E. Erendzhenovin 1933 and published in the newspaper “Ulan khalmg” (“Red Kalmyk”) in 1935. The most important sources for the study of Sart-Kalmyk folklore are the collections of the Archive of Orientalists of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Scientific Archive of the Kalmyk Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (KalmSC RAS), where besides fables, songs and proverbs the manuscripts of the texts of the epic “Dzhangar”, the historical legend “Zyungar Khan” (“Dzungar Khan”) are kept. The fund № 16 of the Scientific Archive of the Kalmyk Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences contains the inventory № 1 with expeditionary records of Sart-Kalmyk folklore on magnetic tapes collected by the researchers of the Folklore Department of the Kalmyk Research Institute of Language, Literature and History A.Sh. Kichikov (1979), B.B. Okonov (1979), T.B. Badmaeva (1979). In the last twenty years, Russian and foreign researchers have carried out a number of important scientific expeditions to the places of permanent residence of the Sart-Kalmyks in order to collect new field material. A deeper look into the history of collecting and publishing Sart-Kalmyk folklore allows to conclude that the texts and audio (video) records made by Russian scientists are valuable sources for the study of the folklore tradition of the Sart-Kalmyks of the 20–21 centuries.

The article examines the current state of the Bashkir folk takmaks. The specificity of this genre as a fact of folklore dynamics is revealed: takmaks occupy a stable position and successfully evolve. Thanks to various competitions of takmak performers held in the republic, in addition to the previously existing ones, more and more new couplets are being composed. They are distinguished by an extraordinary breadth of topics, a direct orientation towards a real-life situation and a fundamentally evaluative nature of the content. In the light of recent events, new takmaks are being written on the topic of a pandemic, covid-19, self-isolation, distance learning for children, etc. If earlier takmaks were created and performed mainly by young people, now the bearers of the genre are elderly and middle-aged people. In the post-folklore space, takmaks exist and are distributed not only orally, but also in writing, in the dissemination of which folklore ensembles and amateur groups play an important role. Placing the texts of traditional takmaks on the Internet is also a process not only of archiving, but also of being and popularization with the help of Internet technologies.

The article is devoted to the tradition of giving spiritual verses as a gift, which arose among Old Believers and representatives of the Orthodox Church parish circle in the first half of the 20th century influenced by the genre of. The Old Believers’ miscellanies, called “Sticharniks”, kept in regional book collections or currently existing among believers, were used as the material. The place of the spiritual verse in the traditional process of donation is demonstrated, as well as the function of preserving the individual memory of the donator, which in the Old Believers and the Orthodox Church parish environment performed the handwritten “Sticharniki”.

The article analyzes the content of the song about Chelyuskintsy (sung to the tune of “Murka”) and how it spread among the people. The lyrics were kept in the investigation cases initiated by the NKVD Department of the Sverdlovsk Oblast’ in the 1930s. NKVD operatives considered that song to be “counterrevolutionary” and arrested people with the lyrics written down. Analyzing the results of folklore research during Stalin’s day, the author determines the importance of the found archival materials within both the context of political communication of the 1930s and the scientific discussion of the heroic topicality of the Soviet mythology. Comparing the text versions of the song with each other as well as with other versions published earlier, the author identifies both common elements and differences of situational and/or personal nature. The analysis of the style and handwriting, personal and other data of the arrested, the stories of the text “circulation” in the testimonies of both the accused and the witnesses, supplemented by facts from other studies, allows us to conclude about the space and social environment for the “counterrevolutionary” work.

The research subject is the intellectual movement subculture “What? Where? When?” and “daughter” games – QUIZ, “60 seconds”, “Brain Slaughterhouse”, etc. during the coronavirus pandemic. Using the participant observation method, new players’ rituals, jokes, comic passwords and names of teams were collected, in which, as in the acts of verbal creativity of experts, it is possible to note the representation of the community’s attitude to the pandemic in three aspects: 1) features, symptoms and consequences of a new disease; 2) administrative measures aimed at limiting spread of the infection: self-isolation, QR-codes, event bans; 3) vaccinations against coronavirus, society attitude to them. A review of the collected material allows us to draw the following conclusions. Making fun of the public life phenomena associated with the pandemic is an effort to make them less scary and dangerous. The attitude to measures of limiting the spread of the infection (underground intellectual games held under conditions of mass event bans, readiness for other violations of restrictive measures) shows not only an attitude to the disease itself, but also distrust of the preventing coronavirus official policy.