Paul Valerie (1871-1945) is one of the most versatile figures in the culture of the twentieth century: a poet, essayist, thinker, playwright, but most importantly — a seeker of keys to French and world culture, a master of the most complex ciphers and deciphers, in which mathematics turned out to be the key to poetry, and dance — the key to philosophy. The Russian reader got acquainted with the texts of this author thanks to the long-standing collection "Paul Valery on Art", prepared by V. Kozov. In this edition, for the first time, Valeri is so fully revealed-a thinker and philosopher of European culture, which he perceived as a single whole, as a bulwark of the entire Western and world civilization. The compiler and translator M. Taimanova carefully selected the author's texts, so that " carefully developed feelings, thoughts, impulses turned into food for the mind and for the soul." The book includes memoirs, dialogues, reflections on the method, literary, metaphysical and cultural-historical essays, aphorisms and fragments of the famous "Notebooks".Most of the texts included in the book are published in Russian for the first time.