The study draws the attention of philologists (literary scholars and linguists) and cultural scientists to the technique of ekphrastic description, which was actualized in literary works of the 20th - 21st centuries, and which, in the context of multi- and transcultural discourse, appears as a foreign ethnocultural case (in relation to the language of description). In addition to a brief description of the varieties of ekphrasis, the authors of the article dwell in more detail on the ritual, pictorial and gastronomic, in which not so much the object of description itself is revealed, but rather the metatextual connotations associated with it are revealed: either in history or in the philosophical understanding of the situation. The object of pictorial ekphrasis is Petrov-Vodkin’s painting “Bathing of a Red Horse” in the story “Penuel” by Sukhbat Aflatuni; ritual ekphrasis is a funeral in the story “Stationary Terrain” (from the collection “Another South”) by Shamshad Abdullaev, as well asa Muslim rite - an analogue of a “lie detector” described in the story “Pump” by Safar Kattabaev; the object of gastronomic ekphrasis is the preparation of gefilte fish from the novel “′A... The Beginning of the Novel” by Mikhail Kaganovich. All the authors are representatives of modern contemporary literature. Ekphrasis created by Andrei Platonov and Gabriel Marquez are used as literary parallels. The authors conclude that ekphrasis, being a pattern of a foreign ethnocultural text, becomes a cultural conductor, expanding the field of Russian literature to transcultural.