Abstract. The author analyses the ancient Russian town research that takes place within the Urban Historical & Cultural Environment Lab of the Russian Institute for Cultural Research. It is concerned with the urban cultural milieu and everyday culture, which are studied as a multifaceted social and cultural phenomenon. Realia of the town dwellers’ life and activities were studied with consideration of cultural modalities conversing one into another, e.g. spiritual potentiality into substantive world, and then into images and ideas after human mastering that world. All that gives a possibility to draw a realistic picture of cultural preferences characteristic of particular strata from the end of the 18th and through the 19th century.

Key words: historical town, historical and cultural environment, everyday culture, Russian super-ethnos, cultural milieu, cultural history, creative history

Shoulepova Eleonora Aleksandrovna,
Doctor in Culturology, Professor,
Deputy Director for Research
of the Russian Institute for Cultural Research (Moscow)
e-mail: shoulepova@ricur.ru