Proverbs and sayings of the Mongolian peoples: specifics of the genre

This article studies the specific features of one of the popular genres of the Mongolian peoples’ oral tradition - proverbs and sayings. It is noted that present proverbs, like other genres of Mongolian traditional folklore, lose their archaic motifs. Some of them being reinterpreted take new features. In modern conditions laconic utterances associated with the pre-existing burglar hunting among Buryats are forgotten, as well as archaic proverbs that separate the role of women and men in society. Considering the poetics of paremias, we can say that they achieve their high artistic perfection with vivid comparisons, antithesis, epithets, repetitions, metaphors, allegories and other pictorial means. Surrounding reality becomes a source of poetically rich images, in which the national specificity of Mongolian proverbs and sayings is manifested. The comparative analysis of Buryat and Kalmyk proverbs, sayings has shown that they do not only belong to an independent genre, but they are the essential components in the structure of folklore works, performing there certain functions. The specificity of proverbial genre also lies in a special poetic structure of the language and it is associated with the actualization of ethnocultural information in certain speech situations, therefore proverbs and sayings serve as one of the most important sources for studying the folkloric picture of the world. In the article we have revealed the features, poetics of proverbial genre, and the functions of proverbs in the structure of folklore texts.