Разыскания в области истории и предыстории русской культуры

Viktor Markovich Zhivov (1945-2013) - one of the largest Russian philologists of the 20th century, a specialist in the history of the Russian language, literature and culture. Doctor of Philology, Professor at Moscow State University and the Department of Slavic Languages ​​and Literatures at the University of California.

The book is a collection of articles on the history of Russian culture from ancient times to the 19th century. The articles are united by both the commonality of their approach and the repetition of a number of topics. The author examines the process of Christianization of Kievan Rus and the interaction of Christian tradition and pagan mentality during the formation of Russian Christian culture, the reception in the cultural space defined by this interaction of elements of Byzantine and Western European civilization, the features of modernization and rationalization of Russian society, determined by the specifics of the cultural background formed as a result of these processes, the role literature in this development. The book is of interest to a wide range of historians, philologists and theologians.

“In this collection we will talk about various details, the story of which is connected not by a single conceptual framework, but by a single desire...to suppress concepts. I wanted to see what would happen to our knowledge about various areas of Russian culture if we took out of it such finished products as the state, law, paganism, enlightenment, Europeanization, intelligentsia, and insert into it the raw materials from which these products were prepared ...". (Viktor Zhivov)