«Paths and Landmarks», written by Dimitri Segal, one of the active members of the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school, is a concise history of Russian literary criticism and academic scholarship throughout the 20th century. Attention is mainly focused on the emergence and development of the formal school of Russian literary criticism (B. Ejkhenbaum, V. Shklovsky, Yu. Tynyanov) against the background of the relevant ideas of the Russian comparative folkloristics (A. Veselovsky and O. Potebnia). Special place is devoted to the pioneering ideas of Vladimir Propp and Olga Freidenberg concerning, respectively, the genesis of folktale and the dynamics of archaic mythological motifs of death and resurrection. Several chapters deal with the history and ideas of Russian literary semiotics and structuralism.