The diploma of Xenia Bogatyreva is devoted to the still insufficiently studied group of church sermons of the middle and late XVIII century, namely, New Year orations. It is well known that the church rhetorical prose of XVIII century is closely related not only to the secular prosaic panegyric, but also to the leading lyrical genre of the time, that is, to the ode, which seems to stress the relevance and the perspective of the work in question.  The work consists of the introduction, three chapters, the conclusion and three appendices, the first being a list of New Year occasional poetry of XVIII century, the second one being the usage contexts of a phrase “new year” (according to the Dictionary of XVIII century Russian Language’s files), and the third enumerating the biblical borrowings in the analysed orations. The bibliography comprises of 12 sources and 49 items of scientific and reference works. The insufficient level of study and the peculiarity of the evidence assumed appealing to such special studies, as, for example, the homyletics manuals and I. Smolich’s and A. Kartashev’s works on the history of the Russian church.   Xenia Bogatyreva has selected, out of 21 in toto, devoted to the New Year, 6 texts. These are orations by Stefan Kalinovsky,  Gedeon Krinovsky, Platon Levshin’s. Gavriil Petrov-Shaposhnikov’s, Anastasy Bratanovsky and Lukian Protopopov’s.  The first chapter of the work is devoted to the description of the calendar reform; the second presents the circle of the authors of the texts, listing their principal data and the reviews by the authors’ contemporaries. The third article is the core of the work. It analyses several structural peculiarities of the orations, namely the headings and the epigraphs. The main topics, by K. Bogatyreva are the topic of Time, the topic of Salvation, and also the topic of Society and Government.   Unfortunately, the work has some deficiencies.  1. The work is compilative and descriptive. The author overuses citing other people’s works and sources, which cannot but negatively impact the scholarly independence of the work.   2. Some of the declared tasks remain unfullfilled. For example, the compositional word analysis is limited to a single statement at p. 42. Also the problem of delineating the individual element of the orations is limited to the description at p. 60. It is most regretful that the analysis of listed motives and topics is absent from the work. It remains unclear why these topics are considered as the representation of the individual element.  3. The work misfeatures repeats and stylistic errors.  There are several questions to the author, namely: 1. How is the topic of the work motivated? 2. One of the principal subjects of the New Year orations, defined by K. Bogatyrev, is the subject of Society and State. How would the author explain its absence in 4 texts under analysis.   Despite the above deficiencies, the work may be considered satisfying the requirements to the diploma and its author, Xenia Bogatyreva, deserving the Bachelor’s degree.  Marina Ponomareva, PhD, Senior Teaching Assistant, Departement of Russian Literature, 08 June 2017