The book includes works of different years. While maintaining their independence, they are at the same time part of a semantic community, a certain conceptual unity that distinguishes real work. It is based on the idea of ​ ​ the complex integrity of Russian literature at the turn of the century, developed on the example of various writer's destinies (late L. Tolstoy, I. Bunin, F. Sologub, L. Andreev, A. Remizov, E. Zamyatin and others). The concept of integrity opposes not only the obsolete view of the literary process of this time as a continuous confrontation of literary trends, but also the tendency to diminish - for the sake of a one-sided understood community - the importance of artistic oppositions in this process. Much attention is paid - including the problems of the Russian neorealist movement of the foreign era.