© 2015, Pleiades Publishing, Ltd. In this paper, we investigated the coherent degenerate and nondegenerate four-wave interaction in the propagation of a femtosecond laser pulse in atomic rubidium vapor. In the case of degenerate four-wave interaction, the mechanism for optical switching in an optically dense resonant medium is considered. The third-order nonlinear interaction of the laser beams intersecting in the cell at a small angle leads to a nonlinear response in the form of a fourth beam, which occurs as a result of the interaction between the two pump beams and the third signal laser beam.