Choosing genres of essays, free academic notes and sketches, the author deliberately wanted to go beyond the "traditional" semiotics into the space of semiotic non-obviousness, where seemingly unshakable axioms about the nature of signs and languages ​ ​ turn into paradoxes and antinomies, losing their indisputable authority. The importance of this task is explained by the fact that the starting point of cognition is scientific curiosity, intuition, imagination, incompatible with academic "boredom" - systematization of known facts and non-critical reproduction of the "obvious." The book addresses a fairly new intellectual space - cognitive semiotics, which is presented as a labyrinth of questions with a series of equally probable answers, unanswered questions and not yet asked questions. One of the areas of work is the approaches to solving an exciting problem: the discovery of atoms underlying the entire linguistic diversity of culture, not only verbal. It is no coincidence that the third part of the essays is entirely devoted to the semiotic potential of the languages ​ ​ of art - painting and music, since these systems, along with science itself, are the most important tool for knowledge, adaptation to the world, and its creation.