The chronotope of holiday in Ivan Shmelev's “The year of our Lord”: the axiological perspective

The article focuses on a spatio-temporal structure of the image of holiday in Ivan Shmelev’s novel “The Year of Our Lord”. We hold that the novel’s chronotope reflects the author’s temporal experience in which the individual merges with the national, the personal acquires an archetypal character and diverse elements of the inner and outer world coalesce into one coherent whole. The typological basis for a temporal experience is the alternation of two modes of being - weekdays, filled with habitual work activities, and holidays, which are an exception to a linear flow of everyday’s life. The phenomenon of holiday, creatively and philosophically reinterpreted, serves as a basis of the novel’s architectonics. The spatial and temporal organization of holiday, in which the eternity bursts into time and becomes “the prevailing force” (N. Berdyaev), acts as a way of communicating value priorities of the author. Inextricably linked to the only all-embracing absolute value in the ontological realm of faith, holiday is conceived in terms of “the ideal” and “the sanctified”. Holiday becomes a basis for a future œmpleteness of perfection, symbolically revealing a logically incomprehensible image of eternity dissolving temporary boundaries. Through a veneration of the holy image, in which the invisible world becomes “present, visible and active” (V.N. Lossky), the eternity enters time, thus bringing these hitherto disconnected temporal domains closer. We come to a conclusion that I.S. Shmelev’s image of holiday might be considered an artistic expression of fundamental national ideals that lie at the core of an axiological models of Russian culture.