The purpose of the article is to assess the scientific-and-scholarly heritage of Nikolai I. Liban (1910–2007), one of the most famous professors of the philological faculty of the Moscow University, whose research and methodological activity lasted for more than 60 years. The reason for the analytical understanding of Liban’s scholarly ideas and approaches was the publication of his collected works and oral presentations (from 2014 to 2017). The article shows that Liban was able, mainly in the framework of his lectures and seminars on Russian literature from Ancient Russia to the beginning of the 20th century, to create an authorial and holistic History of Russian literature. This History is united by a single idea – idea of personality – and by a method that the scholar himself often addressed as sociological, but not “vulgar socilological”, because it was based on the interest in a wide range of literary facts, names, events, which, in his opinion, constituted the essence of the literary life of a particular epoch. Liban understood the “science of literature” precisely as the history of literature, inviting his students to relate philologically to the material being studied, which means taking into account all areas of life in which the person and the word are embodied, which formed the basis of his academic school.