The Soviet people, who create socialist culture, are the legitimate successors of the great artistic values of the past. A lively and inquisitive interest in the artistic phenomena of past eras is growing every year. Taken at the initiative of Maxim . Gorky and carried out by the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR with the wide participation of literary critics of the country, the multi-volume academic history of Russian literature sets itself the task of satisfying the need of the Soviet reader in the scientific understanding of the Russian historical and literary process. Experience of this kind is undertaken in Russian literary criticism for the first time. Collective History of Russian literature XIX in . Edited by. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky consisted of separate essays, heterogeneous in their methodological and historical-literary principles. On the basis of the Marxist-Leninist methodology to give a systematic, coherent and consistent presentation of the Russian historical and literary process, from ancient times to the Great the October Socialist Revolution . The work was hampered by the lack of preliminary research along the issues, In this edition, , Based on existing historical and literary works , re-examine under-studied issues and revisit traditional ones, Obsolete , and often hostile to Marxism's point of view. The methodological basis both for establishing the periodization of the history of literature, and for rethinking the entire historical and literary material was the remarks of the comrades of the I. In. Stalin, A. A-Zhdanova and S. M. Kirov's history textbooks, as well as the party's decisions on teaching history and the fight against vulgar sociology . "History of Russian literature" - the result of joint work of a large team of scientists . Realizing that it is impossible to achieve absolute stylistic unification of the chapters, the editors still sought to observe maximum unity in the nature of the presentation. The general idea of the History of Russian Literature is: 1) to show Russian literature as one of the world's leading literatures in a rich, in many cases new, factual material. 2) to trace the complex and contradictory process of interaction of Russian literature with world literature, while revealing the ideological and artistic identity of the Russian artistic word ; 3), to show the historical and literary process in its social conditionality and regularity, to trace the class differentiation and struggle of literary schools and trends ; 4) find out the significance of artistic heritage for socialist culture. The entire edition is designed for 10 volumes . The first two volumes are devoted to ancient Russian literature .. Volume I (XI beginning of XIII in . ), characterizing the literature of the pre-Mongol invasion, shows that it was not imitative advantage, that the identity and originality were characteristic of it since the middle of the XI century. In this volume, literary works are brought to the fore, who are united with the spoken poetry of their time, with the people's epic , The Struggle for National Independence , condemnations of princely self-interest and internecine strife and imbued with political topicality and patriotism . Literature XI beginning of XIII in. is shown as an organic beginningliterature of fraternal peoples - Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian.