The Book of Passages

The unfinished work of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) on the emergence of modernity in Paris in the mid-19th century was reconstructed from the surviving manuscripts of the author and published only in 1982. It is an annotated anthology of culture and everyday life in the French capital during a period of tumultuous urban transformations and artistic breakthroughs, for which Benjamin dubbed Paris the "capital of the nineteenth century." The complex structure of this anthology includes, along with the author's texts, excerpts from literature, the press, and ephemeral printed material, grouped by themes and comprehensively reflecting the life of the city. The "Book of Passages" is an example of innovative historical optics, surveying material with the gliding gaze of the flâneur, and at the same time a discerning prospective analysis of the most important vectors of contemporary culture. It is published in Russian for the first time.