Leo Tolstoy in the foreign literary mirror

The article is devoted to the problem of perception of Russian literature in German culture, namely, the writer Thomas Mann. The purpose of this article is to identify the most important for European culture results of the Russian literature of the 19th century. Despite the situation of modernism and postmodernism in European culture of the 20th century, the achievements of Russian realism retain their value and significance, which becomes clear due to the reaction of the reader belonging to a different culture. Research methods are hermeneutic analysis, sociology of literature, history of criticism. Material were the critical works of German writer Thomas Mann. The results of this paper show that, along with modernism in the 20th century in European culture, there is a powerful need for realism, which relies on achievements of Russian literature, where analytical realism was introduced in it's pure forms