The article analyzes the role of ‘the thick journal’ in the national literary process and, in a wider sense, the spiritual life of the Russian society. For nearly two centuries, the literary periodical press was the focusing mirror of the national literary process, but under the inяuence of sociocultural circumstances (washing out of the intellectuals as a socially signiёcant structure, falling of authority of the word, development of the Internet, etc.) there was an essential decrease in the reader’s attention to the journal format. At the same time in modern conditions ‘the thick journal’ in Russia as it is reasoned in the paper, seeks to uphold the ideals of culture in accordance with the traditions of national literature.