Scientific heritage of L.P. Shilnikov

This is the first part of a review of the scientific works of L.P. Shilnikov. We group his papers according to 7 major research topics: bifurcations of homoclinic loops; the loop of a saddle-focus and spiral chaos; Poincare homoclinics to periodic orbits and invariant tori, homoclinic in noautonous and infinite-dimensional systems; Homoclinic tangency; Saddlenode bifurcation — quasiperiodicity-to-chaos transition, blue-sky catastrophe; Lorenz attractor; Hamiltonian dynamics. The first two topics are covered in this part. The review will be continued in the further issues of the journal.