With the revival of traditional teaching of humanities in the U.S.S.R. in the mid-1930s, it became necessary to create a manual, that, on one hand, would adapt traditional Classical philology for the Soviet higher school; on the other hand, it would create a concept of Antiquity in its various manifestations, ideologically acceptable for the Soviet state; and on the third, it would be suitable in depth and clarity for people who did not have an old-style gymnasium in their background and had not encounter Classical authors before they came to higher educational institutions. The manual made by R. was published for the first time in 1940; it filled only one of those lacunae. Like the Latin grammars by S.I. Sobolevsky, A.N. Popov and P.M. Shendyapin, Ya.M. Borovsky and A.V. Boldyrev, that manual plaid an important Kulturtraeger function, but  it was designed for a wider audience of future humanitarians. For its time, that manual was an unsurpassed introduction to the Classical Greek literature; there the characteristic early Soviet vulgar sociological approach and accompanying evaluative terminology were completely absent, and even the ideological introduction was minimized and took only the first five pages of more than four hundred. From the point of view of the structure, the following features draw attention. First, the author dwells in detail on the pre-literary stage (mythology, folk poetry and oral songwriting, folklore, heroic songs). Secondly, scientific and philosophical texts are considered in the context of general literary development. Thirdly, R., when required by the logic of presentation, dwells on religious and moral views of certain authors, for instance, tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), reveals their views on the role and place of man in the universe. Finally, the way in which this manual describes the New Testament and Early Christian literature is of special interest. Nowadays, we are not surprised that the manual contains no rough signs of the so-called ‘atheistic pamphlet’, but it also contains details, the presence of which in a censored mass Soviet textbooks were really surprising: for example, the statement (!) that Christianity arose in the Jewish environment as a Judaist sect, and its first texts were written in Aramaic – the Greek versions emerged later, as a result of a break with Judaism; as for the dating of the Apocalypse, it is reported that F. Engels considered it to be the earliest work “in agreement with outstanding scientists”.