Mari State University, Yoshkar-Ola, Russian Federation sylne@mail.ru
ABSTRACT
Introduction: it is significant and relevant to study the language of Mari prayers as a special system in which ritual actions, mythological and magical components, religious and social views, and everyday concepts are transformed into linguistic signs. The
aim of the study is to identify and decipher the verbal, object , and action codes of the Mari ethnic religion.
Research Materials: V. F. Milyutin’s article “A True Description of the Life of the Cheremis Living in the Urzhum District of the Vyatka Province” against the background of prayer texts published in Russian and foreign sources from the XIX and XX centuries.
Results and novelty of the research: Mari prayers embody objective, actional, and verbal cultural codes, basic concepts, and a system of spiritual values. To study them in a diachronic aspect, it is necessary to use early editions of prayer texts, which is done for the first time
in this article. It has been established that V. F. Milyutin’s work (1860) contains a translation of the Mari prayer word into Russian. The prayer includes a solemn appeal to God, a recognition of Yumo’s creative power, and gratitude for his blessings (protection of the family,
preservation of health, and increase in wealth), as well as a description of the needs and aspirations of the believers and a penitential ending (a request for forgiveness for any accidental violations of the ritual). The article reveals the symbolic connotations of ritual objects
(silk bridle, travel bucket, etc.), as well as the semantic content of the multi-layered ritual action, which involves purifying the gift and encouraging the gods to act in a manner similar to the prayers of the believers. As a result of the analysis, the semantic content of the
constant epithet kugu ‘big’, which correlates with the component of the compound theonym Kugu Yumo ‘Great Yumo’, has been revealed. The image of abundance serves as the main symbolic component of comparative constructions in the analyzed text. It has been proven that the grammatical features of the Mari text, which are reflected in the translation, allow us to reveal the foundations of Mari religious philosophy (the unity of divine origin and human efforts in the act of creation).
Key words: Mari language, Mari ethnic religion, text, prayer, translation, cultural code
Acknowledgments: the study was supported by grant № 25-28-00064 from the Russian Science Foundation “Sacred texts of the Mari ethnic religion as a linguacultural phenomenon”.
For citation: Abukaeva L.A. The Mary prayer in translations by V. F. Milyutin: cultural codes in the sacred text // Bulletin of Ugric Studies. 2026; 16 (1/64): 7–15.