The author shares the point of view of V.G. Kuznetsov, according to which Gustav Gustavovich Shpet exert an extremely large influence on the formation of a philosophical hermeneutical tradition in Russia [Kuznetsov 2019]. He considered history as the methodological basis of scientific knowledge, which allowed him to come to the phenomenological problems of hermeneutics and thereby strengthen its methodological sound. In fact, Shpet outlined the directions for the development of hermeneutics as a method of social-humanitarian knowledge. The basis of this problem is, in the opinion of the author of the article, the interest in the phenomenon of communication (not information communication, but just understanding conversation) as a fundamental cultural value, characteristic of all Russian philosophy of that period. This interest ideologically tinted almost all the topics considered by Russian philosophers and constituted the core of their thematic unity (this conclusion of the author leads to a comprehension of the contents of 28 volumes of the series «Russian Philosophy of the First Half of the XXth Century»). Demonstrating the role of this interest in the formation of hermeneutics, the author turns to the work of Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky, a philosopher who significantly differed in his general philosophical views from Shpet, but nevertheless relied, like Shpet, on the sign-symbolic interpretation of the foundations of scientific terminology. Analyzing the forms of expression of scientific knowledge, Florensky turned to semiotics and today his intellectual course is also relevant for the development of hermeneutics as a fundamental method of science.