Since childhood, everyone knows Pushkin’s proverb “a fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it,” but from childhood everyone gets used to looking at it as a purely poetic turn of phrase. And if they agree to take the hint literally, then only in a moralizing sense. But why? Is it because, unlike the previous, so-called traditional consciousness, in the consciousness of modern people, such an important component of mental work as the ability to personify concepts and phenomena has almost completely been eliminated, due to its apparent uselessness? And shouldn't its loss be seen as a cultural catastrophe? After all, this is where the essence of traditional consciousness revealed itself: the ability to personify concepts and phenomena ensured the perception of the entire surrounding reality as a Family - which, in turn, created a surprisingly warm, spiritualizing mood of the collective worldview. And vice versa: modern consciousness, losing such an ability, loses along with it the spiritual warmth of perception of the homeland (big and small), the voice of ancestors, duty to loved ones, responsibility to descendants - it loses precisely because all these concepts become for him “just words ”, saying nothing to either the mind or the heart. The living flesh of history is transformed by such consciousness into alienated mechanical “progress”; the past, present and future cease to be warmed by an intimate, personal, empathetic attitude towards the troubles and joys of their own country and people.