The book of the famous literary critic and culturologist Mikhail Epstein examines the most important metaphysical problems and paradoxes of Russian literature: the holiness of the little man and the demonism of the sovereign power, the meaning of silence and the mute of the word, the unconscious religiosity of the atheistic avant-garde and the Oedipus complex of Soviet civilization. From A. Pushkin and N. Gogol to A. Platonov and O. Mandelstam, I. Brodsky and to modern writers, there are "damned questions" and tragiironic motives of Russian literature, which falls into the extremes of foolishness and demoniality and at the same time painfully seeking the Whole.