Prof. Mark Bender, DEALL chair, gave a keynote lecture at the II INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN MEMORY OF ACADEMICIAN BORIS L. RIFTIN, hosted on Zoom by HSE University, Moscow, October 22, 2021.  Riftin (Li Fuqing; 1931-2012) was the foremost Russian scholar of Chinese folk literature.  He is known for a massive volume called Dungan Folktales and Legends, published in 1977 in Russian, and just issued in 2021 in English translation by Kenneth J. Yin.  The Dungan are a small group of ethnic Chinese in Central Asia who use Cyrillic to write the sounds of Chinese. Bender's talk was entitled "The Genealogy of Shyly Wote: Celestial Connections and Earthly Migrations," based on passages from the Nuosu Book of Origins, a folk epic from Southwest China. Bender was invited to speak by Prof. Alevtina Solovyeva, a specialist in Mongolian folklore and director of the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, HSE University.