The ‘Essays on Russian popular literature’ is a work by folklorist, philologist and ethnographer Vsevolod Fedorovich Miller (1848-1913). The first volume was published in 1897, the second one – in 1910, the third one – in 1924, after the death of the author. The book is a collection of articles, previously published in magazines. The author deliberately rejected the comparative method and set a task of studying ‘the history of epics and the reflection of history in epics’.

In the introduction to the first volume, the author described the order of analysis of an element of epics (Bylina): from the upper layers, the present, to the old, consistently ‘removing’ strata and distortion. In the first essays (‘The Bylina narration in the Olonets Region’ and ‘The Russian Bylinas, its compilers and performers’), the author comes to the conclusion that contemporary narrators of the epic Bylinas inherited their repertoire from professional singers. Hence, Bylina is understood by the author as a kind of poetic work that got into the peasants’ environment from singers and buffoons. The third essay, ‘Observations on the geographical distribution of Bylinas’, indicates the importance of the northern part of Russia in compiling and reworking of Bylinas. The final, sixteenth essay of the first volume also concerns the geographical distribution of Bylinas on the material of new fixations made in the Yakutsk Region. In the fourth essay, the author reveals traces of the pre-Tatar period and echoes of the Galician-Volyn legends in epic scenes. Essays 5-15 of the first volume are devoted to individual characters of Bylinas: Dobryna Nikitich, Volga and Mikula, Khoten Bludovich, Sadko, Ilya Muromets, and others.

The author tries to find out the time and place of shaping Bylinas on the base of common-day and literary data, and also emphasizes the influence of Novgorod culture. He pursues the same goal in the essays included in the second volume of the book. As it was noted by S. A. Tokarev, the essay ‘Ilya Muromets and Alyosha Popovich’ was a classic sample of the historical method in studying Russian literature. In the third volume, where the author, apart from Bylinas, analyzes historical songs and legends, the most interesting is the unfinished ‘Outline of the history of Russian Epic Bylinas’. The author makes an attempt to build a complete picture of the Bylinas shaping and evolution. According to him, Bylinas penetrate into the peasants’ environment only in the sicteenth – seventeenth centuries; and their creators were singers, close to the prince's court and the retinue. The author also notes that there was no all-Russian epic, and those ones of Novgorod, Kiev, Tver’, Rostov, etc. existed separately.

In spite of contradictions of some conclusions, the fundamental study of the Russian epic proved the significance of historical reality in the formation of Bylinas stories. The ideas of M. were developed by his disciples E. E. Eleonskaya, A. V. Markov, B. M. Sokolov, et al.