The educational and methodological manual for the course “History of Contemporary Russian Literature” (fifth year of the full-time and sixth year of the evening department of the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University) fills the existing gap in the study of the literary process of the very end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. The first lecture examines the regulating mechanisms of the literary process, the second – options for the relationship between the author and the character in Russian prose at the turn of the millennium. The manual can be used not only for specific analyses, but also for theoretical understanding of the problems presented.