  A new, formal, non-combinatorial approach to invariants of three-dimensional
manifolds of Reshetikhin, Turaev and Witten in the framework of
non-perturbative topological quantum Chern-Simons theory, corresponding to an
arbitrary compact simple Lie group, is presented. A direct implementation of
surgery instructions in the context of quantum field theory is proposed. An
explicit form of the specialization of the invariant to the group SU(2) is
derived.
