The modernization of education continues to make changes in the life of society, and literary works remain an important tool for understanding this process. This article discusses the possibility of using the method of comparative analysis in classes on Russian and world literature, the interrelationships and patterns of the literary process. In Russian language and literature lessons, the teacher approaches the study of a work of art in the context of the writer's work, the literature of the era. This aesthetically develops schoolchildren, teaches them to see the interrelationships and patterns of the literary process, the cultural life of the epoch. Each work that students study in literature lessons should become for teenagers the subject of deep thought, their understanding is not of lonely figures, but of the system of relationships of the characters against the background of their surrounding being.