The desire for wealth or the inability to cope with financial problems, much more often than is commonly thought, becomes the engine of the plot and determines the behavior and characters of the heroes of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Goethe and Steinbeck, Dickens and Remarque. Profit, credit, and inflation in great novels often play on an equal footing with love and hate, honor and courage. Elena Chirkova talks about this in her book, offering to look at literature from the point of view of its economic content. Elena Chirkova is an associate professor at the School of Finance, Faculty of Economic Sciences, National Research University Higher School of Economics.