The authors of the collection investigated the opposition to "life to death," the means of its expression and the dynamics of values ​ ​ on the material of multi-genre texts. These categories are considered in contexts that allow you to trace their changes in the cultural and historical aspect and significantly complement the ideas about the Slavic picture of the world. The methods and approaches used by the research team analyze the categories under consideration in a clearly distinguished aspect and make it possible to study many additional semantic connotations that accompany them.