The great strength of Slavic studies, with its text analysis trained in formalism and structuralism, is combined in this introduction with an overview of the literary epochs in the Slavic language area, from medieval heroic epics to postmodernism. Students will learn to ask questions about the texts, become familiar with epoch-specific textual features, and gain an overview of the insights of a literary theory that has established literary studies as a science. The example and exercise texts primarily come from Russian and Polish literature, and they will be supplemented online with corresponding texts from other Slavic literatures. This introduction is not only useful for undergraduate students of Slavic studies but also for literary scholars who wish to learn about the methodology of text analysis developed in the Slavic language area.