The monograph summarizes result of work by P. in the sphere of studying epic. Based on a large scale of sources, including the epic not only of the peoples of Eurasia, but also those of Africa and Oceania, this theoretical study is devoted, in the first stage, to the activities of the storytellers of epic texts. The work consists of three parts. The first one: ‘The Storyteller and the Epic Environment’; it examines the training and education of the epic singer, and also tells about the existence of the myth on the miraculous gift, and about the ritual nature of teaching storytelling. This part also analyzes the storyteller's life after the ‘school’, and the religious and ritual aspects of epic performance. The author notes that “by the very fact of performance, the narrator came into contact with spirits and deities and could influence at them in his favor. So, poetry merged with magic”. The second part ‘The Storyteller and the Epic Text’ covers a wide field of problems. The author solves many questions: what is a text in the mind and empirical experience of the narrator? How does he assimilate the epic texts of legends, what and how does he keep in his memory? What are acts of performance in terms of the reproduction of the text? P. shows how these problems are solved by singers belonging to different storytelling schools. The third part ‘Epic Storytellers’ is devoted to the already lost tradition of Russian epic storytelling.