This monograph presents one of the first attempts in Russian research to study large-scale thanatological concepts, as well as ideas about the ‘afterworld’ (or the ‘world beyond the grave’) on the material of Old Russian written literature and folklore. Using a significant layer of Old Russian manuscript and folklore data, the author shows that shaping of those ideas was a result of the layering of religious beliefs and practices of ‘pagan’ and Christian origin. In the short eleven chapters of the book, S. makes an attempt to show the difference between Christian and ‘pagan’ ideas. Relying on the work of his predecessors (Sakharov, Afanasiev, Buslaev, etc.), he considers in sufficient detail the ‘representation of death’: death-darkness, cold, death-sleep, as well as ‘images of death’: death-bird, animal-like monster, human skeleton; and then he discusses “the abode of the soul after the death of man” (“the life of the soul on earth under the species of the elements, plants, insects, birds and animals, man and his shadow”). The author thoroughly considers how the journey into the afterworld was imagined (the symbolic meaning of the burning of the dead, types of burial in a boat, on a sleigh, horses, death as a travel on foot.) He also considers various funeral customs, and finally proceeds to reasoning about the idea of retribution and transformation of concepts of the afterlife in the Christian milieu. S. explained such incomplete coincidence of popular thanatological ideas and Russian folk ideas about the afterlife (among people who have preserved their ‘pagan’ concepts and practices for centuries, combining them with Christian ones), exclusively with the ignorance of Russian people.