What are the lessons of Russian culture, what does it have to offer us and our time? Fortunately, Russian cultural studies have a rich history - including the works of Nikolai Berdiaev, Pavel Miliukov, George Vernadsky, Nicholas Riasanovsky, Wladimir Weidle, Georges Florovsky, Dmitry Chizhevsky, James Billington, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Dmitry Likhachev (who is a contributor to this volume and a link to the earlier tradition), and more recently Alain Besançon, Yury Lotman, Caryl Emerson, Katerina Clark, Boris Groys, Mikhail Epstein, Irina Paperno, Boris Uspensky and Geoffrey Hosking among others - that offers orientation and points of engagement in answering such questions. In spite of a rich diversity of approaches that have changed over time and in reaction to historical and social context, these and other cultural analysts most often depend on certain basic vantage points they assume in common, whether in part or in whole. They are: the language origins of a culture, its geographic location, its religious and ideological attachments, and its broadly based folk ethos. Yet other points of view exist in aesthetic texts that are equally open to history and later uses by cultural observers but that have some material permanence in their media of transmission.