Orthodox Christians celebrate the Feast of the Nativity of Christ on January 7, according to the new style. This celebration is associated with various customs and rituals, among which the pre-holiday feast and the Christmas meal itself occupy an important place.

A person is connected by need and care and nevertheless knows about the holiday. Somewhere deep down, the memory of time, completely free from everyday matters, is always stored. After all, the holiday is nothing more than freedom from need and care. In the Old Slavonic language, the celebration meant "empty, unoccupied." This “emptiness”, “unnoticed” of the holiday indicates not only the termination of the usual course of time.

From the life of Israel-Aleksandra Gelfand-Parvus In the second decade of October 1924, a necrologist signed by Karl Radek appeared in Pravda. It began with the following thoroughly deliberate words: “In Berlin, he died from a blow at the age of 55, Gelfand-Parvus. The younger generation knows this name as the name of the traitor of the working class, as the name of not only the Social patriot, but the person who unites in his face the inspirer of the German Social Democracy and the speculator.

The ball given on September 17 by Countess Anna Alekseevna Orlova-Chesmenskaya was of a completely different type, in a different taste than the celebration of Prince Nikolai Borisovich Yusupov. This is what is called in the field of graceful grandioso; This is the kind of ball that only the Sovereign Sovereign could give until now. Imagine a hall 80 arshins long. And you will not be surprised that 1,000 people fit in it very easily, that 7,000 candles were needed to illuminate it!

This book is the result of the International Scientific Conference “Multiculturalism and the Transformation of Post-Soviet Societies”, held at the Carnegie Moscow Center in September 1999. The collection for the most part consists of fairly critical articles, the authors of which seek not so much to glorify the new fashion as to subject it to a strength test. What happened as a result can, without much exaggeration, be called a collective manifestation of post-Soviet ethnoskepticism [1] .

I The past of science in our country refutes some evidence. We are used to thinking that without freedom of thought, without free discussions and honest competition of ideas, she stalls. It turned out, everything is more complicated. Here it has come - dreary and terrible time. That there are medieval bonfires of the Inquisition, indexes of prohibited books, courts over the best minds!

Once I saw an archive document of the years of the 50-60s of the last century. The police officer was fired from the internal affairs bodies "for aimless shooting." Of course, I became interested. It turned out: the policeman started a drunken day with a drunken business to fade into space from a service weapon, for which he paid. The holiday in the USSR is not only sprats, the Olivier salad and the songs about reeds and frost-moded. This is also a set of drunken feats.

A pretty battered album with the inscription " Ponesie ", wound with dull gold on a dark cherry safyanic cover, I saw at the St. Petersburg collapse. (Such album notebooks at the end of the 19th and early twentieth centuries were published specifically to rewritten poems.) Apparently, it was dusting for a long time on the shelves of Bukinistic stores, and it was gradually focused: judging by the numbers on the cover, no one wanted to buy it for 1 p.

What cannot be spoken about must be kept silent about. L. Wittgenstein Alexander Feodosievich Gryaznov (15.X.1948–7.XI.2001) has been known to all graduates of the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University for the last thirty years. His life and professional path - and for a philosopher this is almost the same thing - lay straight and did not experience sharp turns; there are no moments in it that could attract the attention of a biographer.

In this issue of OZ, we have adopted a different approach from the previous issues of the journal. We wanted to take stock of the results of our first full year in producing OZ and draw some conclusions concerning new directions and topics for future issues. That is why, for once, we do not offer one major topic for discussion — in future we will revert to our concept of thematic issues.

Relations between the armed forces and religious associations are a reflection of self-sufficient state-confessional relations. After the decades of the triumph of official atheism, the Russian government under the guise of correcting past deformations headed for the clericalization of the state. To a large extent, these trends affected the "power" departments of Russia. However, this did not happen right away.

There are two natural astronomical indicators by which it is possible to measure the passage of time - the movement of the Moon and the Sun across the sky. The Jewish calendar is lunisolar, that is, it takes into account both the movement of the Moon and the Sun. The movement of the Sun serves to count days - a day, or day, is the period of time between sunsets. The day, in turn, is divided into hours.

In Russia, every national holiday is accompanied by rituals and songs or singing adopted by them. The very origin of this or that celebration, the content and purpose of them, decisively separates them from church saints. festivities and independently in relation to St. rituals of the church, because most of the folk holidays arose during the times of the deepest paganism, when various government decrees, trade transactions, etc. were combined with liturgical rites.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries (until the revolution), there were few factory-made Christmas decorations - they were imported mainly from Germany. The production of Christmas tree decorations in Russia was very small - in St. Petersburg and Klin. The most popular toys at that time were those made using chromolithographic images glued to foil, paper, wire, and cotton wool. This technology began to develop in Germany in the mid-19th century.

Deeds of bygone years, Tradition of deep antiquity... Long before the onset of Christmas time, conversations about them began. The closer December 25th came, the more preparations there were. The Russian warrior does not need much preparation: he is always ready for anything; but it is necessary to satisfy the habit ingrained from childhood - to prepare for the holidays.