The article explores the place of the hero in the modern world. The hero is a cultural institution and a mythological archetype. Reconstructs the cultural history of heroism. Separately examines the history of Russian heroic culture. Reconstructs the cultural standard of the Russian hero. Reconstructs the mythological archetype of the hero, in which the anthropic principle of being is revealed. New generations of people look at the image of the hero and understand who they are and why they exist. Reconstructs the archetypal path of the mythological hero: election, initiation, feat, return to people. The heroic myth is a nuclear element of social habitus, that is, a way of reproducing social structures in the mental (conscious and unconscious) structures of the human personality. This means, first of all, that ideas about the hero and heroism are inextricably linked with historical and cultural forms of social structure and practice.