This book consists of two parts. Part 1 "Slavic literatures" includes the following essays: L.I. Sazonova "Literature of Mediaeval Rus" within the context of Slavia Orthodoxa: Theoretical and methodological problems of the study of genres"; N.N. Pokrovskii "Byzantine and Old Russian traditions in the literature of Old Believers in Eastern Russian of the 18th - 20th centuries"; A.V. Lipatov "European literatures and Slavic literary communities (Genesis and initial periods of modern history); S.V. Nikol"skii "On the poetics of hidden motifs and implicit meanings in the anti-utopias of the Capek brothers and of M. Bulgakov"; etc. Part 2 "Culture and folklore of the Slavic people" contains the following: V.V. Sedov "The Slavic world on the eve of the disintegration of its linguistic unity"; V.E. Bango "Marginal cultures between the East and the West (Russia and Spain); A.L. Toporkov "A Contribution by Slavic philologists of the 19th century to the development of the theory of myth"; etc. Bibliographic references.