Russian Finnougrist conference

A total of 300 scientists from 19 regions of the Russian Federation took part in the event.

As always with such events, everything starts with greetings. So too were the scientists greeted by the Head of the Government of the Republic Yuri Zaitsev, Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of the Republic Anatoly Smirnov, First Deputy Head of the Government Yevgeny Kuzmin, Minister of Information, Culture and National Policy Konstantin Ivanov, and Mayor of Yoshkar-Ola Anton Trudinov. The leadership of the republic awarded many outstanding Finnougrists with high decorations and letters of thanks.

The chairman of the Committee of Fenno-Ugric Peoples of the Russian Federation, Academician Anatoly Rakin (Komi), the chairman of the Association of Finno-Ugric Peoples of Russia, Senator of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation Pyotr Tultayev and Tatyana Barakhova, the head of the National Cultural Centre of Finno-Ugric Peoples, sent their greetings to the conference.

A moment of silence followed, commemorating the Finnougrists who had passed away within five years.

Conference programme

Four presentation were given at the plenary session. Lyudmila Grigoryeva, Director of the Mari Institute of Language, Literature and History and PhD candidate in philology, gave a presentation on ‘Modern Finno-Ugristics: Achievements and New Development Vectors’. Professor Praskovia Mizina, Adviser, Doctor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, National Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants, gave a presentation on ‘Official Medicine and Traditions of Finno-Ugric Peoples in the Use of Medicinal Plants’. Nadezhda Shutova, Senior Researcher, Department of History, Institute of History, Language and Literature of Udmurtia, Doctor of History, gave a presentation on ‘Prospects for the Study of Udmurt Ethnogenesis Today: Sources, Approaches, Problems’. Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Head of the Department of Uralic Languages, Folklore and Literature at the A. Herzen State Pedagogical University Sergei Myznikov gave a presentation on ‘Some aspects of the etymological analysis of Turkicisms in Finno-Ugric languages’. Yuri Antonov, Head of the Department of Finno-Ugric Languages at Mordovia State University, Doctor of Linguistics, gave a presentation on ‘The ideological and genre specificity of contemporary Mordvin literature’.

After this, the conference participants continued their work in sessions on the topics at Mari National University: ‘Current Issues in the Historical and Contemporary Lexicology of Finno-Ugric Languages and their Dialects’; ‘Problems of Morphology and Syntax of Finno-Ugric Languages’; ‘History of the Written Languages of Finno-Ugric Peoples’; ‘Folklore as a Reflection of Ethnocultural Worldview’; ‘Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Contemporary Finno-Ugric Literary Studies’; ‘Issues of the History of Finno-Ugric Peoples’; ‘Cultural Space and Education of Finno-Ugric Peoples’; ‘The Experience of the Scientific Interpretation of the Artistic Content of Finno-Ugric Literature’, and others.

New committee

During the conference, a meeting of the Finnougrist Committee of the Russian Federation was held to elect new leaders for the organisation and to determine the venue for the next conference. Oleg Sergeyev, linguist and senior researcher at the Mari Institute of Language, Literature and History, was elected as the new chairman. Oleg studied at the University of Tartu as a postgraduate student from 1986 to 1989 and is a student of Academician Paul Ariste. In 1990, he defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Tartu on the topic ‘Manuscript dictionaries of the Mari language in the 18th-19th centuries’, supervised by Paul Ariste and Eduard Vääri. In addition, Ivan Ryabov, Dean of the Faculty of Linguistics of the Mordovian State University, was elected Deputy Chairman of the Finnougrist Committee. The next conference was decided to be held in Saransk in five years’ time.

Previous conferences have been held in Yoshkar-Ola (1994), Saransk (2000), Syktyvkar (2004), Khanty-Mansiysk (2009), Petrozavodsk (2014), Izhkar (Izhevsk, 2019).

See photos of the VII Finnougrist Conference of the Russian Federation on VKontakte.