The monograph describes the functioning of apologies in the Russian language and Russian culture from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics. The study was carried out on the basis of the corpus of texts, the material of the author's direct observations, as well as data obtained using specially developed questionnaires. The functioning of the apology is considered from the standpoint of theory of interaction, speech acts and conversion analysis. Depending on the reason that gave rise to the apology situation, the following typology is proposed: metacommunicative, conventional and "substantive apologies" (i.e., for serious reasons). The relationship of different types of apologies with the structure of the dialogue is established, their relationship with the nature of the implementation of the politeness category is analyzed. The material studied in the monograph of the modern Russian language and Russian culture is compared with the data of other languages, primarily German.