The Message of the Editorial Board This issue of the Journal of Siberian Federal University (Humanities) is devoted to the Year of Literature in Russia. <...> The fact of drawing attention to the issues of Russian literature, the problems of studying, teaching and promoting literature as the highest achievement of Russian civilization, speaks for itself. <...> Books have always played a special role in Russia due to the focus of the culture on literature in general. <...> Destruction of this principle in the postmodern epoch had immediately effected such quality of Russian literature as its widespread presence in religious, political, social philosophic and scientifi c discourses, and consequently in the disciplinary network, certain spiritual and intellectual traditions. <...> The nature of this status was ambivalent: dissolution of the literary origin in non-literary verbal contexts prevented the isolation of literature as an independent kind of aesthetic activity. <...> However, at the same time it also created the effect of “omnipresence” of literature leading many social practices to book samples. <...> The transition from the Enlightenment faith in the power of the Word to undermining of the status of the Author, relativization of literary writing, signifi cant violations of the conventions and boundaries of literary art in general – ranging from their outmost socialization within the Soviet project to de-socialization and total revision in the postmodern aesthetics, where the hierarchical vertical is substituted by the pluralist horizontal, occurred in the middle – end of the 20th century. <...> Along with the acquisition of an autonomous status, literature faced visual arts commercialized before itself, the symbolic value of which is determined by the popularity with the masses. <...> Without the support of the government, literature has not been able to compete on equal terms due to the low demand, lowering of the status of the intelligentsia, which has lost its previous social charisma, as well as due to thinning of the layer of “serious” readers heading at some point to the entertainment provided by visual kinds of art. <...> The tradition of working with complex texts, which constitutes one of the most important features of the national culture, has been devalued. <...> At the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries the “popular writer” phenomenon has appeared. <...> Their earnings are substantially higher than those of classical writers, for whom literature was the service, the mission. <...> The demand for mass literature, a writer-onlooker, observer, who estrange themselves from their own text, becomes an indicator of the crisis of literocentrism <...>