Image. Music. Gesture

The legacy of the outstanding French philosopher, literary critic, and semiologist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) includes books that combine literary and academic writing in various proportions, notes for lecture courses and their transcripts, reports from conferences and symposiums, interviews, and numerous essays — articles for the press, collections, encyclopedias, exhibition catalogs, etc. This edition includes essays from different years dedicated to the sign, meaning, writing — themes that determined the optics through which Barthes viewed the entire diversity of the world — as they exist outside the field of literature. Among them are programmatic works on cinema and photography (“The Photographic Message,” “The Third Meaning”), almost all of Barthes' texts about artists (Arcimboldo, Glöden, Masson, Twombly, Erté, Rechnio), articles on music and theater. Abounding with examples of surgically precise structuralist analysis applied to the most whimsical artistic forms, the collection also allows for a judgment on the breadth and subtlety of the author's aesthetic tastes. Most of the works are published in Russian for the first time.