The book is devoted to the evolution of historical culture, the historical representation of an educated society in Russia in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. Several cross-cutting plots of the collective historical memory of Russian society are considered: attitude to the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and Peter I; to popular uprisings and Old Believers; to opposition movements - the Decembrist uprising and populism. This made it possible to recreate the semantic content of the most important categories of Russian culture of the 19th century. ("power," "people," "intelligentsia") in their figurative and artistic specificity.