On December 26, 2009, barely reaching the age of sixty (born November 20, 1949), Andrey Mikhailovich Samozvantsev died suddenly. The external outline of his life was uncomplicated. He studied at the Department of Ancient World History of the Moscow State University Faculty of History (1967-1972) and here acquired the habit of scrupulous work with sources. The supervisor of the thesis on "Arthashastra" was E. M. Medvedev, who drew his attention to the problem of land ownership - one of the main ones for determining the social system of Ancient India. Andrey had the closest friendly relations with Evgeny Mikhailovich until the latter's death in 1985.
A. M. Samozvantsev defended his PhD thesis in 1975 at Moscow State University on the topic "Theory of land ownership in Ancient India". It was published in 1978 as a monograph entitled "Property Theory in Ancient India". By this time, he had already become a researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences. The change in the title of the work was due to the fact that Andrey Mikhailovich was not interested in socio-economic problems of land ownership, but rather in the terminology of sources and the relationship between the concepts of property and ownership in Indian law. He gave in his book a thorough analysis of fragments of the dharmashastra and Arthashastra on the issue of proof of property rights. He demonstrated, in particular, that, despite the use of different terminology, the Arthashastra reflects the same range of ideas as in the dharma literature.
During his post-graduate years, A. M. Samozvantsev continued to study " Arthashastra "with the author of these lines - and in the late 1970s our book"Arthashastra: Problems of Social Structure and Law" was published. It was based on the commented translation of the third book of the monument devoted to legal topics. In addition to participating in the translation and commentary of the source text, Andrey Mikhailovich also wrote the research chapter "Problems of Ancient Indian Law". Here the ideas that were expressed in his pen were developed.-
howl of the monograph. He spoke about the organization of the court and the process, the basic concepts of ancient Indian law and the problems of its evolution. The author emphasized the high degree of development of jurisprudence in Ancient India, its clear, developed conceptual system. The book was published in 1984, and the following year it was published in English translation by Sterling Publishers, India. English version ("Society, State and Law in Ancient India") it contained only research chapters, but no translation of the Sanskrit monument.
The authors planned to continue their joint work on the commented translation and research of the main monuments of ancient Indian law. A translation of the dharmashastra Narada (Narada-smriti, or Naradiya-Manu-samhita)has been prepared to fulfill this purpose using all known versions of it. The translation was accompanied by an extensive commentary of a textual and legal nature (with numerous quotations-parallel passages from other dharmashastras). The book was completed in early 1985, but was not published until 1998.
Meanwhile, A. M. Samozvantsev continued to work tirelessly on the translation and commentary of the dharmashastras. In 1991, he defended his doctoral dissertation on "The legal text of Dharmashastra", published as a monograph in the same year. The main part of the work consisted of fragments of the earliest monuments of ancient Indian law - the dharmasutras. Each fragment was provided with detailed explanations based on medieval commentaries. Those sections of the dharmasutras were chosen for translation, in which Andrey Mikhailovich saw the origins of the legal sections of the later dharmashastra literature - the so-called "Laws of Manu", "Yajnavalkya-smriti" and "Narada-smriti". The central idea of the book was that the dharmashastras do not reflect any development of Hindu law: its basic concepts were formed before the formation of the earliest surviving monuments.
After completing the Narada smriti, it was the turn of the Yajnavalkya smriti. Some parts of the translation of this monument were published by A. M. Samozvantsev in the magazine " Peoples of Asia and Africa "in the late 1980s, and in 1994 the" Book of the Sage Yajnavalkya " appeared in its full form. The translation was accompanied by an extensive "Exploratory Commentary" that included numerous references to parallel dharmashastra texts and retellings of medieval commentaries. The author also tried to trace the logic of constructing the text, its composition, and the principles of dividing it into thematic sections (prakaranas).
In the late 1990s, A. M. Samozvantsev first started teaching (at the Institute of Culture, at the Institute of Practical Oriental Studies) and with his usual thoroughness began to master new topics and scientific literature. The result was the writing of the book "Mythology of the East" (2000). Using this experience, he once again returned to translating Sanskrit monuments. In 2003, the book "India: Religions, Beliefs, Rituals (Ancient and Medieval times)"was published. In the first part, the author gives a general overview of "Vedism, Brahmanism and early Hinduism". The second part contains a translation of fragments of medieval Sanskrit monuments describing the rites of planetary worship ("Brihatparasara-smriti" and "Brahmokta-yajnavalkya-samhita").
But Andrey Mikhailovich did not abandon his studies of ancient sastras, becoming more and more inclined to study not the content, but the form of monuments. The result is the publication of a number of articles devoted to the structure of individual dharmashastra and "Arthashastra", the evolution of the corresponding literary genres. Shortly before his death, he published the book "Arthashastra of Kautilya. Books I-II", containing an annotated translation of the first two books of the famous treatise. In the large research chapter "Arthashastra of Kautilya: the world of text and the world in the text", the author was mainly interested not in the problem of using text as a historical source, but in the characteristics of its form ("regulatory function of the classifier text", "subjects and objects of text regulation", etc.).
A decent and very kind person, Andrey Samozvantsev left a bright memory of himself. His actions and utterances sometimes left an impression of eccentricity. He was quite reserved and very lonely, and he did not represent the audience for which he wrote (and often did not want to take it into account). Always truthful, sometimes Andrey behaved naively to the extreme. I remember a funny and characteristic episode. G. M. Bongard-Levin came up to us and said: "Did you see who came out
my new book? It's for sale over there." Samozvantsev reacted literally like this: "Is it worth buying? Is there anything new there?" Grigory Maksimovich was hard to disconcert, but Andrey succeeded. And this was said not out of boldness or impudence, but without much reflection, out of simplicity of heart only.
No matter how one views the late indologist's conclusions and translation practice, one cannot fail to appreciate his many years of conscientious and tireless work. In many respects, thanks to Andrey Mikhailovich, the most important monuments of Sanskrit literature of the sastras for a historian became available in Russian translation. The publications left by him will become the basis for further research.
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