Umberto Eco is a renowned Italian writer, author of the international bestsellers 'The Name of the Rose' and 'Foucault's Pendulum,' winner of major literary awards, founder of scholarly and artistic journals, semiotician, and cultural historian. His works have been translated into forty languages. The essays included in this book grew out of a paper, 'The Problem of the Open Work,' delivered at the XII International Congress of Philosophy in 1958. In 1962, they appeared under the title 'The Open Work' and were supplemented by a detailed study devoted to the poetics of Joyce, in which the author attempted to trace the artist's development. This collection continues a series of scholarly works by Umberto Eco published in Russian.