Embodying the image of the hero of her tragic time — the hero of an absolute act in the midst of hopelessness, absurdity and abandonment of God — Simone Weil (1909-1943) not only gained fame as a great religious philosopher who went from Marxism and atheism to the ultimate forms of Christian asceticism, but also became the Kierkegaard "knight of faith", whose paradoxical thoughts and actions it became a kind of foundation for the moral survival of European civilization after two world wars. The first Russian translation of Simone Weil's selected "Notebooks", provided with a detailed historical, cultural and philosophical commentary, finally introduces this unique collection of ideas, equivalent to Montaigne's "Experiments" and Pascal's "Thoughts", into the Russian intellectual reader's everyday life.