The New Year's Celebrations 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 New Year's Celebrations in his late, émigré works ("The Summer of God", 1927–1948; individual stories) is not just a nostalgic sketch of pre-revolutionary life but a complex artistic-theological reconstruction of a coherent cosmology. The New Year's Celebrations in Shmelev are not a stage in the calendar but a time that has become a sacred space, where through a child's perception, the profound connection between life, faith, nature, and the national soul is revealed.

1. The Chronotope of the New Year's Celebrations: Time as a Festival and Eternity.

Shmelev creates a sense of elongated, meaningful time. The New Year's Celebrations 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 silence and anticipation of the Vigil to the revelry of the "frightening evenings" and the purifying Baptism. Each day has its liturgical and everyday code.

Sacralization of everyday life: During the New Year's Celebrations, 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 New Year's Celebrations in Shmelev are a time when boundaries are blurred: between 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. The Semantics of Festivals: From Christmas to Epiphany.

Shmelev meticulously describes the internal logic of each stage of the New Year's Celebrations, showing them as a unified liturgical year in miniature:

Christmas: The apogee 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 becomes cozy and inhabited.

"Frightening" evenings (before the day of St. Basil and the Baptism): A time of playful, carnival inversion. Divinations, masked figures, "frightening" stories. Shmelev does not condemn this "sinful" side from the standpoint of strict churchliness but shows it as a folk "relief," a natural reaction to the tension of the sacred period. Through the child's fear and curiosity, the irrational depth of the world is understood.

Baptism (Epiphany): The climax and culmination. Purification and order. Frost, the sanctification of water, the solemn cross procession to the Jordan. If Christmas is God entering the house, then Baptism is God appearing to the whole world, sanctifying the elements. A symbol of the victory of light and structure over the New Year's chaos.

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

Food in Shmelev's New Year's Celebrations is one of the main ways to experience the festival and a sign of God's abundant world.

The Vigil: A fasting but refined meal ("sokolovina", 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.

St. Basil's Eve: The mandatory pork head — a tribute to folk tradition and St. Basil the "porker," a symbol of prosperity. Through taste and smell, Shmelev conveys the corporeality, the fleshly joy of the Orthodox festival, alien to the asceticism of spiritualism.

Interesting fact: In the chapter "The New Year's Celebrations," Shmelev masterfully describes the ritual of "glorification" (similar to carols). 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 festival live not in ideal aesthetics but in spontaneous, powerful, folk spontaneity, which is the true "beauty of God's world."

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

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

Irreducibility of "sacred" and "frightening": The child experiences both awe at the Christmas service and the horror of New Year's 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 without a doubt in the reality of the miracle, in the conversations of animals on Christmas night, in the prophetic power of dreams. This faith is the foundation of Shmelev's portrayal of the world.

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

5. The Émigré Context: The New Year's Celebrations as a Lost Paradise and a Spiritual Homeland.

Shmelev began writing "The Summer of God" in émigré, far from Russia. Therefore, his New Year's Celebrations are not only a reminiscence 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 New Year's Celebrations 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 New Year's Celebrations offer a model of an organized, meaningful, bountiful existence.

Conclusion.

The New Year's Celebrations in Ivan Shmelev are a total artistic-religious cosmos, constructed according to the laws of childhood memory and Orthodox world perception. It is a world where:

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

National culture and churchliness form a living synthesis (the glorification of Christ by sweater boys, New Year's games next to prayer).

Time becomes not linear but sacred-cyclical, which resists 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 saving faith.

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

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