The article formulates main questions related to the concept of context. The issue of context is considered as a current-day interdisciplinary field of research. There are many definitions of context in dictionaries and in various humanities (including scientific disciplines). In connection with that issue various methodological approaches arise in the humanities, which can be designated by the umbrella term “contextual”. By the example of one of such approaches to the sociological poetics of the “Bakhtin’s circle”, the author substantiates the possibility of creating an interdisciplinary classification of contextual approaches. That classification may include scientific developments of different years and research fields, including: philosophical hermeneutics, a number of approaches to the Russian and foreign literary theory (M.M. Bakhtin, Yu.M. Lotman, B.M. Eichenbaum, F. Moretti, A. Compagnon, etc.), intellectual history, discourse analysis, etc.