Modern Traditionalism: Wake for Utopia vs. Revival of Realism (Instead of the foreword) The present issue of the Journal of Siberian Federal University, which you hold in your hands, is the result of the work of a group of authors with different ideological and aesthetic preferences, but converging on the interest in the topic of modern Russian literature, Russian traditionalism in its literary manifestation. <...> The chance to collect the works of the experts in the same issue is not accidental. <...> A few years ago we fi rst talked about traditionalism as a peripheral direction of our literature, the writers of this kind were read and published less, but the end of the era of post-modernism again actualized the realistic principles of writing. <...> This is not to say that today’s generation massively turned to books by V. Belov, V. Astafi ev, V. Rasputin, V. Lichutin or B. Ekimov. <...> This does not happen, but the themes, motifs, images that these writers denoted, have become quite popular, although sometimes their meaning is leveled, formalizing up to the sign. <...> The artists with directly opposing views (A. Prokhanov and V. Rasputin, M. Tarkovsky and E. Limonov) begin to appeal to traditional values. <...> Village Prose, which gave the basis of literary traditionalism, has provoked rigid ideological disputes since it appeared. <...> Depending on the actualization of a particular model in the offi cial ideology, the attitude to the Village Prose writers changes. <...> V. Rasputin is convinced that Village Prose as it is now “could not either appear or have its mournful say in the 1970s. <...> Perhaps, not the writers created this fi ction, but literature, as a living and sensitive process, by its will, created writers for this prose”, # 1052 # Modern Traditionalism: Wake for Utopia vs. Revival of Realism (Instead of the foreword) “which is able to locate nerve endings accurately on the huge body, which we call ‘nation’” (Rasputin, 2007, 481-482). <...> The western Russian philology had an opinion that Village Literature defended the cultural prestige of the country. <...> The monographic works of the late 1990-2000-s devoted to the ideological-thematic and aesthetic originality of the prose of the village, raised the question of its relations with the traditions of Russian classics, studied the creation of positive national character, archetypes, the specifi city of narration, utopian and ideological contexts. <...> These are the works <...>