Walter Benjamin's (1892–1940) unfinished work on the emergence of modernité in mid-19th-century Paris was reconstructed from the author's surviving manuscripts and published only in 1982. It is an annotated anthology of the culture and everyday life of the French capital during a period of turbulent urban transformation and artistic breakthroughs, for which Benjamin dubbed Paris "the capital of the nineteenth century." The complex structure of this anthology includes, alongside the author's texts, excerpts from literature, the press, and ephemera, grouped thematically and comprehensively reflecting the life of the city. "The Book of Passages" is an example of innovative historical perspective, surveying the material with the fleeting eye of a flâneur, and at the same time a penetrating, long-term analysis of the most important vectors of contemporary culture. This is the first time it has been published in Russian.