The common point of the latest discussions has become the statement of the obvious crisis in the study of Russian literature. As a rule, the Soviet version of the literature history is considered to be ideologically incorrect and becomes a subject to various ‘revisions’.

There is quite a number of misunderstandings in the written history of Russian literature, and the greatest of them is the incomprehension of its spiritual essence. Important: Russian literature was Christian. The word ‘literature’ itself is the least appropriate in this case. Latin – ‘litera’, Greek – ‘gramma’ (in Russian translation ‘letter’ – ‘bukva’). Different words were derived from these roots: literature, grammar, bukvar’ (ABC book). It would be more precise to call Slavic and then Russian writings with another word.

The ideologeme in relation to Ostrovsky was formulated far back in the bowels of radical-democratic critics and still remains influential. This is the notorious ‘dark kingdom’ (by Nikolai Dobrolyubov). The ideal world of Ostrovsky’s heroes – humble, obedient to parental will, patient – was incomprehensible to Dobrolyubov. These heroes seemed to him socially ‘underdeveloped’, ‘narrow-minded’, and ‘oppressed’. Apollon Grigoryev sees in Ostrovsky not a denunciator of ‘petty tyrants’, but a poet of people’s life.

In this paper the notions of studying and understanding is differentiated within the modern humanities. This differentiation is used both in the interpretation of the history of Russian literature and in the interpreting of works of Russian literature. Well-known in cross-cultural psychology etic and emik approaches are considered as methodologically important poles of interpretation of ‘one’s own’ and ‘another’s’ culture in general and literature in particular.