Christmas and Easter themes in the literary heritage of Yuriy Mirolyubov

A Russian emigrant writer Yuriy Mirolyubov (1892-1970) wrote a lot about Slavic antiquities. His name is associated with the origin of a legendary “The book of Veles” ( Velesova kniga). This article studies his literary works in a historical and literary context, thematically associated with Christmas and Easter. The son of a priest, Mirolyubov was able to create original Christmas and Easter tales. As a priest’s son Mirolyubov managed to create indigenous Christmas and Easter stories. He brought back an already existing genre tradition of Christmas and Easter literature to its folklore origins, freed it from absolutely literary accretions and narrative stereotypes. Yuri Mirolyubov strived to put the Christmas and Easter stories beyond moral (much less entertaining) literature, put them in the mainstream of a folk, “Russian epic” (Ivan Shmelyov). That was a definition given by an author Ivan Shmelyov to his writing “The Lord’s summer” ( Leto Gospodne), who also updated the Canon of Russian calendar (Christmas and Easter) literature in his own way. In fictional prose Yuri Mirolyubov acted as a scientist-ethnographer, a sensitive receptionist of everyday phenomena and psychological states. But in the works defined as scientific, he became a true artist, who felt free to deal with the most complicated and poorly studied material, however, existing in the depths of people’s consciousness.