Abstract
The general theme of the study is Russia's contradictory relationship with Europe in an epoch called Muscovite Russia. The author tries to descibe the image of the European spiritual world from the viewpoint of the literally active social stratum.
It focuses on three sets of written monuments associated with important moments of the historical development of Muscovite Russia - on the polemics against the Florentine Union of the mid-15th century, a cycle containing the theory of Moscow as the Third Rome of the first half of the 16th century and finally the narratives of the Time of Troubles of the first decades of the 17th century. In all cases, they are texts representing the long-term tendencies of Europe's perception in the Moscow environment and the undisputed peaks of the Russian thinking of the late Middle Ages and early modern times.