Ritual After Atheism: Soviet New Year and the Afterlife of the Sacred in Alexey Salnikov’s The Petrovs in the Flu and around It

This article examines how Alexey Salnikov’s The Petrovs in the Flu and around It transforms the Soviet New Year into a narrative form for tracing the persistence of the sacred after state atheism. Soviet antireligious campaigns condemned Christmas trees and associated figures as religious remnants before the state rehabilitated them in 1935 as a children’s festival of collective happiness and socialist futurity. Combining historical contextualization with close reading, the article follows three layers: Petrov’s childhood Soviet yolka; Marina’s performance as Snegurochka amid stored images of Lenin, the Kremlin, and the Young Octobrists; and Petrov Junior’s participation in a post-Soviet celebration. Petrov Junior knows that Ded Moroz is not real yet anticipates the “New Year ritual,” while inherited ornaments evoke “reverential delight.” These scenes separate literal belief and ideological assent from ritual efficacy. Through repeated scripts, performed roles, intergenerational objects, and the return of the feverish child to Snegurochka, the novel makes ritual persistence a principle of narrative structure. I describe this persistence as the afterlife of the sacred: not an Orthodox restoration, but the capacity of a state-manufactured secular festival to organize collective time, affect, family memory, and a residual expectation of renewal after the socialist future has lost credibility.