The singing culture of the Holy Trinity Seraphim-Diveevsky monastery of the late 19th — 1st quarter of the 20th century (according to the memoirs of contemporaries)

The article presents the experience of scientific reconstruction of fragments of the liturgical and singing life of the Holy Trinity Seraphim-Diveevsky Monastery from the late 1880s until the closure of the monastery (1927). The context is, on the one hand, historical data, on the other hand, materials related to the prehistory of the formation of Diveev's own singing culture. The main source base was the memories of pilgrims and residents of the monastery. Memoir literature is practically the only thing that allows us to judge the singing culture of Diveyev of the pre-revolutionary period and the first post-revolutionary years, since during the Soviet period the monastery was ruined, its archive was not preserved, liturgical books and sheet music were lost.The picture is complemented by data on the liturgical and singing component of the life of the Diveevo sisters after the closure of the monastery, about the preservation of the clergy traditions of the monastery by the nuns in exile.Having collected and systematized the preserved information, the authors tried to "contour" (as far as the available materials allow) to recreate the image of Diveevo singing at the turn of the century and in the first quarter of the twentieth century — with its characteristic high solemnity of services, "harmony of the chartered monastery", an excellent level of choral performance. The single information that has come down to us about the repertoire, which included both traditional chants and the author's spiritual music during this period, is presented and commented on.The work outlines the periodization of the history of liturgical singing of the Diveevo monastery. A hypothesis is put forward about the gradual change of stylistic guidelines in local church singing. If, judging by the available data, at the beginning of the XIX century, monody tunes based on the style of Old Russian chants sounded in Diveyevo, then at the beginning of the XX century, a multi-layered, stylistically polyphonic singing culture was formed here, including the author's spiritual music and a corpus of local chants of traditional stylistics ("Diveyevsky chants").