The article deals with methods of historical and philosophical research that are rarely used in contemporary works on the history of Russian philosophy: historical and philosophical reconstruction, reactualization/marginalization of philosophical content, intercultural methodology (polylogue philosophy), biography, and prosopography methods. The authors show the specificity of each method, their places in the practice of research, their heuristicics for the history of Russian philosophy, and significance for expanding historical and philosophical knowledge. The relevance of applying “new” methods is based on the following facts: the reissue of basic texts of Russian thinkers has been completed, there is active work in archives leading to the introduction of “marginal” texts, i.e. unfinished texts with unestablished meanings, into the scholarly circulation, and the range of historiographical literature with a rich variety of existing interpretational schemes has significantly increased in the last three decades. The use of “new” methods makes it possible to revise existing models of the history of Russian philosophy, to abandon the view of Russian philosophy as a series of influences and borrowings, and to propose a new periodization of the history of Russian philosophy. In particular, the method of “collective biography” reveals the dynamic side of the history of science, ways of forming scientific schools, intergenerational connections, and the influence of the non-philosophical context on scholarly work. The significance of methods for Russian philosophy covers a range of aspects: expanding verified historical and philosophical knowledge; showing the actual content of Russian philosophy that may be in demand in modern philosophy; forming a more comprehensive view on the historical and philosophical process concerning not only personalities, but also generations, schools, etc.; and the explication of the context (historical, biographical, social, cultural) as well as interpretation of ideas.