The book from the series “Behind the Pages of a School Textbook” will help students, based on descriptions of everyday objects, tools, customs and mores, to immerse themselves in the era of the creation of a literary work. The authors of the manual structured it in the form of chapters devoted to individual masterpieces of Russian classics of the 18th–19th centuries, included in the school curriculum. Each chapter is provided with comments explaining the meaning of little-known or disappeared objects, terms, names, etc. At the end of the book, students are offered a list of literature for a more in-depth study of the works of Russian classics.