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We present the individual results of a qualitative, comprehensive reviews analysis of collections of poems published in Russian literary periodicals of recent years. We formulate the goal of the reviewer – to attract the reader to his text and through it to the poetic work; the task of the reviewer is to detect and convey to the reader such signs of the author’s style and poetic work (book) as the essence of this style, which make it possible to speak of the author and book as unique, different from all others (“Pushkin is Pushkin”). We emphasize that a literary critic works primarily on the individualization of an artistic work. In this regard, we unfold the analogy of the work of the critic with the work of the forensics analyst on the identification of an unknown ob-ject: as such object (identifiable) serves not yet written content of the review, as an object for comparison (identifying) serves the poetic text. We list the features that are being compared, we indicate that these features are not accidental, but are strictly due to the task of individualization. We sum up that the poems review is not a simple reflection of the poems peculiarities, plus the critic’s subjective attitude towards them; for a deeper understanding of how a literary-critical work is created, it is necessary to borrow a number of concepts from another field of knowledge – the forensic identification theory.

The work displays progress and results of the quantitative study of poetry book reviews published in the Russian-language literary periodicals in recent years (2014–2019). We describe the method of material selection (chronological framework, range of sources – literary and philological journals, newspapers, – criteria for selection of literary-critical texts), the method of calculating the volume of material. We give the main quantitative characteristics of the received corpus: total number and total volume of texts, average annual number and volume, average volume of one review (calculated both for the entire array and separately for review-digest – bibliographic leaflets), number of reviewers, number of sources. All sources, which are 46 literary publications, are divided into three groups, depending on the published volume of reviews. The work contains a brief description of these publications in connection with the review activity: the presence and fea-tures of literary-critical strategy, rubrication, etc. The appendices to the work provide detailed quantitative data. The research collects a significant corpus of texts (more than 400 a. s.) describ-ing and analyzing contemporary Russian poetry. The quantitative data obtained for the first time helps to form a relevant scientific picture of “who makes Russian literature today”.