The book by Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917—1992), an outstanding French and Lithuanian semiotic and linguist, professor at the Higher School of Social Sciences in Paris, founder of the Paris Semiotic School, is devoted to the analysis of a number of literary texts: M. Tournier, I. Calvino, D. Tanizaki, H. Cortazar, R. M. Rilke, et al. The author's approach is an original combination of semiotics, philosophy and phenomenology, with the aim of presenting an aesthetic object as the end point of striving for perfection. Greimas suggests looking at human life as a sequence of often monotonous everyday events, which can be dealt with only in one way — through aesthetic experiences that give life a higher dimension and endow it with meaning. Greymas is known to European and Russian readers primarily as the creator of the “semiotic square” and the “narrative scheme” of the text, as well as the “semiotics of passions”, together with his student and co-author Jacques Fontanieux. The work “On imperfection” became the basis of later directions of semiotics of the Paris school of the beginning of the 21st century: semiotics of the sensual, bodily semiotics, semiotics of life forms. The book is published in Russian for the first time. The publication is of interest to a wide range of specialists in the humanities and can be used as an additional textbook in university courses on semiotics, philosophy, literary studies, art history.