This book includes articles written and collected as part of the Shelf project. Created in 2017, the project aimed to identify the most important works of Russian literature. To do this, a large community of experts compiled a list of 108 works that left a mark on history, expanded the possibilities of literature, influenced the development of language, thought and society, said something new about the world and man and entered the Russian literary canon. These are novels, stories, short stories, plays, poems, literary memoirs - from The Tale of Igor's Campaign to the novel Chapayev and Emptiness. The authors tried to write about each of these works clearly and accessibly, relying on extensive scientific and critical literature, place each in a large literary context and talk about other texts that influenced it and were influenced by it.

The first two volumes of this publication include 60 articles - about Russian literature from the time of Ancient Rus to 1917.

The third and fourth volumes of the publication include 48 articles on Russian literature from 1918 to the post-Soviet period.

The publication "History of Russian Poetry" includes articles written by the authors of the "Polka" project for the large course "History of Russian Poetry", which covers the period from Ancient Rus to the present day. Alexander Arkhangelsky, Alina Bodrova, Alexander Dolinin, Dina Magomedova, Lev Oborin, Valery Shubinsky talk about the origin and development of Russian poetry: how did Old Russian poetry become Russian? Where did Romanticism come from? What did Lomonosov, Pushkin, Nekrasov, Blok, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Brodsky and Prigov do? What explains the poetic explosion of the Silver Age? How did official and unofficial poetry coexist in Soviet times? What happened in Russian poetry of the post-Soviet decades?