Researching the archives of Russian post-October abroad thinkers is one of the main tasks of modern Russian philosophy. The return of the spiritual wealth of Russian intellectual culture that has begun in the late 1980s with the publication of hard access and works of bibliographic rarity of N.O. Lossky, N.A. Berdyaev, S.L. Frank, S.N. Bulgakov and others, is continuing today. However, at the beginning of the XXI century the trajectory of this return changes slightly. The published works of Russian abroad thinkers require a holistic reading, rethinking and actualization. These problems cannot be effectively solved without plunging into the existential and intellectual history of Russian philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. That is why modern historians of philosophy turn to the archive, and not so much as an empirical object, collection and repository of documents, but as a cultural, historical, humanitarian phenomenon, thanks to which, through the collective efforts of philosophers and scientists, a holistic portrait of Russian philosophy in its personal dimension is brought together. We can consider the archive of any Russian philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century as an “archive of the era” (T.G. Shchedrina), as a “sphere of conversation” in which the meeting of thinkers of the early twentieth century and modern philosophers is possible. Such a methodological turn affects the content of historical and philosophical research and changes our ideas about the Russian abroad philosophy, about the era as a whole, and also allows us to reconstruct the heritage of Russian philosophers and consistently collect the value-semantic unity of Russian intellectual culture while preserving its “diversity and unity” (M.A. Maslin).