The two-volume book presents a literary-critical analysis of the movement of Russian poetry and prose of the last four decades in constant comparison and correlation with trends and with classical names of the 19th - first half of the 20th centuries, among which Pushkin and Lermontov turned out to be decisive or especially significant for the author , Gogol, Dostoevsky, Vl. Solovyov, Sluchevsky, Blok, Platonov and Zabolotsky - thoughts about certain facets of their work resulted in independent research. Among contemporary writers, prose writers Andrei Bitov and Vladimir Makanin, poets Alexander Kushner and Oleg Chukhontsev occupy a central position in the author’s outlook. modern chapters of a general nature devote a lot of space to tough literary polemics. The last two sections of the second volume reflect the author’s steady interest in the embodiment of socio-ideological themes in specific literary genres (section “Ideological novel”), as well as in the current state of philological science and poetry (section “ Philology and philologists”).