The book of the famous Russian linguist E.F. Buddha (1859-1931), offered to the reader's attention, was one of the first experiments in writing the history of the literary language in Russian science. It traces the basic laws of the development of the Russian literary language, analyzes the problem of enlightenment, the state of Russian education in different periods of the development of the nation, the influence of school education on the literary language, touches upon issues of historical phonetics and morphology. The book is intended for specialists in the history of the Russian language and Russian literature, philological students, everyone who is interested in the history of literary languages.