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's work are not a stage in the calendar, but a time itself that has become a sacred space, where the profound connection between life, faith, nature, and the national soul is revealed through childhood perception.

1. Chronotope of the Holidays: Time as Festivity and Eternity.

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

Cyclicity and rhythm: Time moves not linearly, but in a circle of sacred events — from the silence and expectation of the vigil to the festive "scary nights" and the purifying Baptism. Each day has its liturgical and everyday code.

Sacralization of everyday life: During the Holidays, all 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's work 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), and between the earthly and the heavenly (the sky "opens up," the stars "speak").

2. Semantics of Festivals: From Christmas to Epiphany.

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

Christmas: The climax of family, warm, "domestic" sanctity. 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 embodiment of God in the world, and therefore the world becomes cozy and inhabited.

"Scary" nights (before the Day of St. Vasiliy and Epiphany): A time of playful, carnival inversion. Divinations, masked figures, "scary" 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 childhood fear and curiosity.

Epiphany (Baptism): The climax and culmination. Purification and order. Frost, the sanctification of water, the solemn procession to the Jordan. If Christmas is the God who has entered the house, then Epiphany is the God who appears to the whole world, sanctifying the elements. A symbol of the victory of light and structure over the festive chaos.

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

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

Twelfth Night: A fasting, but exquisite meal ("sokolnik," fish, stew) — 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, gratitude for the embodiment. Food becomes a material expression of joy.

Vasiliy's Eve: The mandatory pork head — a tribute to folk tradition and St. Vasiliy the "pork-slayer," a symbol of prosperity. Through tastes and smells, Shmelev conveys the corporeality, the fleshly joy of the Orthodox holiday, alien to spiritual asceticism.

Interesting fact: In the chapter "The Holidays," Shmelev masterfully describes the ritual of "glorification" (similar to carol singing). It is important that Christ is glorified not by professional singers, but by "sweater boys" — simple workers from the factory. Their singing is "out of tune, thick, rough," but it has such power that it takes your breath away. For Shmelev, this is a key moment: true faith and festivity live not in ideal aesthetics, but in spontaneous, powerful, folk passion, which is the true "beauty of God's world."

4. The 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).

Indissolubility of "holy" and "scary": The child experiences both awe at the Christmas service and fear from the Christmas 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 believes unconditionally in the reality of the miracle, in the conversations of animals on the Christmas night, in the prophetic power of dreams. This faith is the foundation of Shmelev's depiction of the world.

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

5. The Émigré Context: The Holidays as a Lost Paradise and a 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 customs 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 an ontological key — 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 author's world, Shmelev's Holidays offer a model of an organized, meaningful, bountiful existence.

Conclusion.

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

Life and being are inseparable (liturgy continues at the table, prayer is in everyday work).

Folk culture and churchliness form a living synthesis (the glorification of Christ by sweater boys, Christmas games next to prayer).

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

The main witness is the child, whose perception becomes a tuning fork of truth 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 act 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 the affirmation of eternal, rooted in faith and tradition, foundations of human existence.

Permanent link to this publication: