The book is a historical and typological research of myths and epic cycles about Raven — the hero of tales and legends, the mythological proto-ancestor and trickster, often mentioned in the tales of peoples of Kamchatka, Chukotka, and Alaska. Summing up the survey of mythological ideas of Paloasians of the Chukotka-Kamchatka group given in the first chapters of the book, M. defines the place of Raven in their mythological system as the tribal proto-ancestor, cultural hero, and the first Shaman.
Opposite to the heavenly god, who created the macrososm, Raven built the microcosm, i.e. human society – and he also played a role of mediator between the worlds. Analyzing mythical plots about Raven in the folklore of Evenks, Yukagirs, Eskimo, and Aleuts, the author comes to the conclusion about the borrowing of the Raven epos by these peoples from the folklore of Paleoasians. The author shows that variants of legends signed from American Eskimo are close to the versions of Native Americans, and legends signed from Asian Eskimo are close to the Chukotka versions; so, M. considers that myths about Raven are not the indigenous part of the Eskimo folklore and they did not take a central part in the Eskimo traditions of the past. Nevertheless, he does not exclude that a part of the Raven myths could be traced back to one common source.
The author set a task to characterize the structure of the Raven folklore as a typical structure of the creation myths, mythological stories, and heroic myths. He classifies and compares the main motifs of myths — mostly, about the cultural deeds of Raven the earner. Numerous schemes built by the author show the plot structure of the myths in the form of interconnected and crisscrossed semantic links, which are systematized in semantic factors, microstructures, and links.
According to M., initially, myths about Raven as a cultural hero were shaped in phratries and clans named after him, for whom he was the totem proto-ancestor; at that, such phratries and clans could appeared before the now-existing ethno-linguistic division. In general, the content of the most ancient for Asia and America fund of the Raven motifs, classified by M., serves as a solid fundament for the conclusions about common Paleoasian roots of the Raven epos, and about the translation of that folklore tradition to America c. ten thousand years ago.