This article deals with the holiday calendar in contemporary Russia. Up to now, it has been customary among Russian ethnologists to speak of three periods of formation and radical transformation of the Russian calendar: a) during the introduction of Christendom, b) during the rule of Peter the Great, and c) in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. It is now appropriate to add one more period of intense change: the present, post-Soviet era. An attempt is made to provide a classification of the numerous Russian holidays. The article also presents the results of an interview with a group of Moscovians; the interview was carried out in order to elucidate their attitudes to certain holidays.
This paper attempts to show that Nil Sorskii, the author of the well-known
three-volume “Sobornik”, in compiling this collection of ancient Greek
vitae used Greek texts as well as Slavonic translations. He compared the
Slavonic texts with the Greek originals and corrected their difficult archaic
language, thus turning it into the understandable simple Russian language
of his own time.