This book is the first domestic edition of the works of the famous culturologist V. Shchukin. It is devoted to the problems of Russian culture, Russian thought and Russian literature. The book analyzes the Russian Westernism of the forties of the XIX century as a socio-literary phenomenon, various aspects of the myth of the noble nest as an oasis of beauty, nobility, freedom and love. This myth, starting from the era of romanticism, actively influenced the formation of self-consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia, and later became an integral part of the national consciousness of the Russian person. The author of the book is close to the methodological approach of Greves and Antsiferov, who, when interpreting cultural phenomena, emphasized getting used to the object of research through experience and disclosure of its internal form. The geoculturological approach allows you to study three aspects of this problem at once: the true realities of the life of landowners, mythopoietic images inspired by the estate, and the artistic features of literary works that depict manor realities. The author explores two fundamentally different ways of Russian life, two sets of ethical and aesthetic norms, which can be conditionally defined as the European and para-Asian ways.