The book contains articles, printed in 1960-90 years mainly in inaccessible scientific journals, domestic and foreign, as well as previously unpublished. The subjects of the book is broad and diverse: Russian poetry, especially Mandelstam (the author was at the forefront of the domestic mandelshtamovedeniya) and Boris Pasternak, and Russian and foreign prose of the twentieth century (in the center of Vladimir Nabokov, but also Andrei Platonov, H.L . Borges, A. Murdoch); general poetics - here belong to the author recognized classical work on metaphor and communicative Stroe lyrics; folklore and such small forms , on the one hand, the parable and, on the other hand, the Soviet slogan; general and special semiotics - the author was formed in the depths of the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school; structural linguistics - semantics of the unions to the structure and semantics of abusive expletives; Finally, the philosophy of a semiotic point of view (the problem of what is truth , philosophical worlds Vl. Soloviev and Shestov). The common denominator in all of this diversity - the author attempts to reveal the internal structure of the studied texts and phenomena find their invariants, understand how they work.