The Presidential Library highlights Peter and Fevronia’s life

July 8, 2019, Russia celebrates the Day of Family, Love, and Faithfulness for the 12th time. On this day, the Russian Orthodox Church honors Saints Peter and Fevronia, who since ancient times were considered patrons of family and marriage in Russia.

“They lived happily ever after and died on the same day”, - it is said about this holy couple. Blessed Prince Peter came to the throne of Murom in 1203 and rightly ruled for a quarter of a century. In his old years, the prince and his beloved wife Fevronia took the veil. They prayed to God to die in one day, and bequeathed themselves to bury themselves together. Spouses died each in his cell in one day and hour - July 8, 1228. Their bodies were laid in different mansions, but the next day they were together. Peter and Fevronia were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. Today, the relics of Saints Peter and Fevronia are in the Holy Trinity Convent in Murom. The tradition of the secular celebration of the day of Peter and Fevronia was regenerated by the Murom people in the 1990s: they decided to combine the Day of the City with the Day of Family Values. The Day of Family, Love and Faithfulness has become a national one in 2008.

The Presidential Library’s collections contain an interesting publication donated to the institution by representatives of the Fevronia publishing house and the Holy Trinity Convent of the city of Murom. The book “The Ideal of Love and Faithfulness - Saints Peter and Fevronia. The history of the Russian Orthodox Church" preface the words of Academician Dmitry Likhachev: "The work of Andrei Rublev and the artists of his circle in Russian literature of the XVI century can be found only one match - "The Tale of Peter and Fevronia of Murom" ... And the heroine of the Story, the wise maiden Fevronia like Rublev’s quiet angels". The book makes you think about a lot in our age of great speeds, because "the motive of matrimonial purity, preserved thanks to the wisdom of the princess, is one of the main ones in The Tale of Peter and Fevronia".

Its main covenant is in the first epistle of the Apostle Paul quoted to the Corinthians: “Love is patient, merciful, love is not jealous, love is not exalted, not proud, not outrageous, not seeking its own, not irritated, does not think evil, does not rejoice in untruth, but rejoices with the truth; it covers everything, believes in everything, hopes in everything, suffers everything. Love never ends".

The Presidential Library’s collections feature electronic copies of both ancient books, revealing the history of marriage and wedding ceremonies, as well as their modern interpretations contained in scientific research. The latter also reflect a change in the concept of "family" in different periods of Russian history.

With the formation of the society and the state, laws and rules governing various aspects of the institution of the family began to appear: the book Marriage and Family (1900) spelled out what personal relations of spouses should be according to civil law, in which “conjugal cohabitation became defined in the popular consciousness an ethical institution".

Readers are available on the portal a lot of interesting materials dedicated to the traditional family values ​​of the crowned Romanov family, such as documents, rare newsreels, photographs. The essay “Emperor Nicholas” (1894) describes the attitude of Emperor Nicholas I to this issue.

Views on the family, on the relationship between men and women have changed dramatically after the revolution. The author of the book Morality and Life of the Proletariat in Transition Period, E. Yaroslavsky (1926), emphasizes that the new system creates a new type of family, where two comrades jointly participate in the socialist accumulation of moral values ​​and are the cells of society, in which held by the state. The new family institution also provided for the social education of children.

The Presidential Library’s collections contain modern research, the subject of which has become precisely family values. This is, for example, reflected in the study by Y. Goncharov "Urban family of Siberia in the second half of the XIX - beginning of the XX century". The author's abstract of the dissertation of E. Yenchinov “Family Values ​​of Altaians: Transformation of Customary Law in Modern Culture”, reveals the basic attitudes of Altai residents in the field of family traditions.

Historians, sociologists and demographers exploring the current state of society note the emerging tendency for Russians to return to basic family values, the carriers of which are Saints Peter and Fevronia, who initiated the Day of Family, Love and Faithfulness introduced in Russia.