The Holidays in Ivan Shmelev's Description: Mythopoeics of Childhood and the Ontology of Festivity

Ivan Sergeyevich Shmelev's (1873–1950) approach to the theme of the Holidays in his late, émigré works ("The Lord's Summer", 1927–1948; individual stories) is not just a nostalgic depiction of pre-revolutionary life but a complex artistic-theological reconstruction of a holistic world order. The Holidays in Shmelev are not just a stage of the calendar but a time itself, becoming a sacred space in which the profound connection between everyday life, faith, nature, and the national soul is revealed through childhood perception.

1. Chronotope of the Holidays: Time as a Festival and Eternity.

Shmelev creates a sense of stretched, meaningful time. The Holidays for the boy Vanya are not just days between Christmas and Epiphany, but "festival-festivals," a special state of the world:

Cyclicity and rhythm: Time moves not linearly but in a circle of sacred events — from the silent and expectant vigil of the Eve of the Nativity to the festive "frightful evenings" and the purifying Baptism. Each day has its liturgical and everyday code.

Sacralization of everyday life: During the Holidays, every aspect of life becomes a ritual. Even the most ordinary actions — feeding livestock, cleaning the house, preparing food — are filled with symbolic meaning. "The world stood still in anticipation of the Miracle, and everything in it became a sign of this Miracle."

Blurring of boundaries: As in folk tradition, the Holidays in Shmelev are a time when boundaries are blurred: between the world of the living and the dead (memories, prayers), between social classes (the poor and carolers come to the house), between the earthly and the heavenly (the sky "opens up," the stars "speak").

2. Semantics of Festivals: From Christmas to Epiphany.

Shmelev meticulously describes the internal logic of each stage of the Holidays, showing them as a unified liturgical year in miniature:

Christmas: The climax of family, warm, "domestic" holiness. The smell of the Christmas tree, wax, tangerines; the feeling of the "Christmas miracle" as an intimate family event. The main thing here is the Incarnation of God in the world, and therefore the world itself becomes cozy and inhabited.

"Frightful" evenings (before the Day of Vasiliy and the Baptism): A time of playful, carnival inversion. Divinations, masked figures, "frightful" stories. Shmelev does not condemn this "sinful" side from the point of view of strict churchliness but shows it as a folk "relief," a natural reaction to the tension of the sacred period. The irrational depth of the world is understood through the child's fear and curiosity.

Baptism (Theophany): The climax and completion. Purification and order. Frost, the sanctification of water, the solemn cross procession to the Jordan. If Christmas is God entering the home, then Baptism is God appearing to the entire world, sanctifying the elements. A symbol of the victory of light and structure over the holiday chaos.

3. Gastronomy as Liturgy: "The Banquet of Being".

Food in Shmelev's Holidays is one of the main ways of experiencing the holiday and a sign of God's abundant world.

The Eve of the Nativity: A fasting but refined meal ("sokolnik," fish, broths) — an ascetic joy of anticipation.

Christmas: An explosion of festive abundance: pork with porridge, "pork" delicacies, goose with apples, mountains of pies. This is not gluttony but an eucharistic feast, an expression of gratitude for the Incarnation. Food becomes a material expression of joy.

The Day of Vasiliy: The mandatory pork head — a tribute to folk tradition and St. Vasiliy the "pig-keeper," a symbol of prosperity. Through tastes and smells, Shmelev conveys the corporality, the fleshly joy of the Orthodox holiday, alien to the asceticism of spiritualism.

Interesting fact: In the chapter "The Holidays," Shmelev masterfully describes the ritual of "slavleniye" (analogous to carolers). It is important that Christ is praised not by professional singers but by "sukonniki" — simple workers from the factory. Their singing is "unmusical, thick, rough," but it has "such power that it takes your breath away." For Shmelev, this is a key moment: true faith and the holiday live not in ideal aesthetics but in spontaneous, powerful, folk vitality, which is the true "beauty of God's world."

4. Child's Perspective: The World as a Miracle.

Perceiving the Holidays through the eyes of a child is not just a literary device but a theological stance. "If you do not turn and become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matt. 18:3).

Irreducibility of "sacred" and "frightful": The child experiences reverence at the Christmas service and the horror of holiday divinations with equal intensity. For him, the world is whole and animate.

Trust and acceptance: Adults may be skeptical about omens or masked figures, but the child unconditionally believes in the reality of the miracle, in the conversations of animals on the night of the Nativity, in the prophetic power of dreams. This faith is the foundation of Shmelev's portrayal of the world.

Perceptibility of mystery: The mystery of the Incarnation for Vanya is not abstract — it is in the smell of the pine tree, the taste of the kokoshnik, in the prickly frosty air of the Baptism. The spiritual is understood through the material.

5. Émigré Context: The Holidays as a Lost Paradise and Spiritual Homeland.

Shmelev began writing "The Lord's Summer" in émigré, far from Russia. Therefore, his Holidays are not only a memory but also an act of creative "resurrection" and affirmation.

Nostalgia as creativity: A detailed, almost ethnographic description of rituals and everyday life is an attempt to preserve the lost world in words, to make it indestructible.

"Russia, which we have lost" appears not in political but in ontological terms — as a space of harmony between God, nature, and man. The Holidays become a symbol of this lost harmony, its quintessence.

Spiritual alternative: Against the backdrop of chaos and atheism in the modern world of the author, Shmelev's Holidays offer a model of an organized, meaningful, bountiful existence.

Conclusion.

The Holidays in Ivan Shmelev are a total artistic-religious cosmos built according to the laws of childhood memory and Orthodox world perception. This is a world where:

Life and being are indivisible (liturgy continues over the table, prayer in everyday work).

Folk culture and churchliness form a living synthesis (the praise of Christ by sukonniki, holiday games next to prayer).

Time becomes not linear but sacred-cyclical, which stands against the historical catastrophism of the 20th century.

The main witness is the child, whose perception becomes a tuning fork of authenticity and a metaphor of the saving faith.

Thus, Shmelev creates not just a description of holidays but a mythopoeic utopia of "Holy Russia," where the Holidays serve as its ideal temporal model. This is an attempt to return the lost time — the time when God was "at home" in the human world, and the world was in God. In this context, Shmelev's Holidays become a powerful act of resistance to spiritual decay and an affirmation of eternal, rooted in faith and tradition, foundations of human existence.

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