This article contains some response to critics who have written about the author's book "Mirrors and the Chimeras. On the emergence of an Old Russian State". These articles were written by P. I. Gaydenko and V. V. Puzanov. The author of the article and of the book is grateful for the high estimation of some aspects of his research and sees some weak sides of the book himself. For example, he could not take into account all works by foreign historians. The matter is that the material related to this subject matter is enormous and is dispersed among different and rare publications. Searching out relevant works must continue in the near future, but for this purpose great efforts are necessary. First of all, the author attempts to give answers which he calls peripheral problems. He means the title of his book, the language, and the images which he uses. All this represents an effort to make his work more interesting to his readers; but images also carry semantic value. The author has not the opportunity to argue historical problems, because for this reason one has to mobilize other works of the author, all his complex conceptions in a work of historiography. But anyway the author persists in his opinion on these historical problems. The main task of his book was to study the adventures of a "democratic path" in Russian polito-genesis. The author notes that the critics agree with his main idea and with his division into periods of Russian historiography. They criticized the author's manner of conducting polemics. In this article the author attempts to explain his approach.