The book talks about the special place of the so-called small genre (essay, story, story) at the end of the 19th - 20th centuries. In this regard, we consider both the works of L. Tolstoy and Chekhov, which largely determined the direction and discoveries of the literature of the new century ("The Death of Ivan Ilyich", "The Kreutzer Sonata", "A Boring Story", "Ariadne"), and the works of I. Bunin, L. Andreev and M. Gorky, their connections and echoes with representatives of new literary movements (symbolists, acmeists), their polemics and confrontation. The second section talks about poetry, about such poets as F. Tyutchev, who, one might say, was anew discovered at the turn of the century and anticipated a lot in the poetry of the 20th century, as well as Bunin, whose poems amazingly combined tradition and innovation. One of the first places, if not the first, and rightfully so, belonged in the Russian diaspora to G. Ivanov, an extremely deep and original poet, far from being read. It can be said quite definitely today that no one wrote better than A. Tvardovsky about the Patriotic War, about its everyday life at the front and in the rear, about its incalculable and irreparable losses, losses and tragedies (“Vasily Terkin”, “House by the Road”) .