The paper deals with theories of folklore presented in the works of Kirill Chistov and Boris Putilov, two eminent Russian folklorists of the late 20th century. In the 1980-90s, the study of folklore underwent a global crisis related to theoretical reflection and cultural criticism. The conceptual marginalization of the discipline, which occupied an intermediate position in relation to literary studies, anthropology and art history, made its methodology mainly empirical and generally ‘backward’ in comparison with other social sciences and humanities. The ‘substantialistic’ view of folklore as an autonomous and self-sufficient ‘superorganic’ system with its own laws, structure of genres, etc. was a significant obstacle to the evolution of folkloristic theory and methodology. Critical approaches to this ‘substantialism’ developed differently in various countries. In the late USSR and post-Soviet Russia, these developments were complicated not only by political and ideological prescriptions but also by the conceptual language of the social sciences in the late Soviet period. Chistov and Putilov, who tried to reconcile dogmatic substantialism with more up-to-date critical debates, faced in this context a number of deep methodological problems. At the same time, their theoretical works written in the 1970-90s contributed in many ways to the growth of methodological reflections in Russian folkloristics. The paper focuses on both their original theoretical findings and readings of Western research works on folklore.