Nadezhda Vasilyevna Golik's monograph "The Ethical in Culture" is a series of essays united by ethical issues and an appeal to 20th-century artistic experience to understand contemporary ethical problems. It is believed that the majority of the essays comprising the monograph were written in the 1990s and 2000s. The text unfolds as an interaction between the discourses of philosophy, artistic criticism, and moral criticism. The range of figures from the history of philosophy covered is extensive, but limited primarily to two poles of time—ancient (Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch) and modern (S. Kierkegaard, P. Florensky, I. A. Ilyin, Russian religious philosophers,
the Frankfurt School, M. K. Mamardashvili, V. V. Bibikhin, and others). Among the artistic personalities, the reader will encounter A. Strindberg, V. Nabokov, E. Hemingway, T. Williams, S. Vitkevich, E. Warhol and others, whose work, in the author’s opinion, has heuristic potential for understanding the socio-cultural situation of “anthropological catastrophe” in modern Russia.