This is the first detailed biography in our country of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, a contemporary and rival of Hegel, an interlocutor of Goethe, a witness of the Napoleonic wars and revolutions. The fate of his teaching was not simple. He was not recognized during his lifetime, and in our country during Soviet times his name was mentioned only in a negative sense, accompanied by reproaches for subjectivism, pessimism, irrationalism, voluntarism, reactionism, hostility to revolutionary transformations of the world and other mortal sins. This lonely, gloomy man who believed optimism with a “vile view”, constantly thinking about human happiness and studying Eastern philosophy, created his own teaching in which man and nature are one, and enriched humanity with a number of remarkable insights that were far ahead of his time. The biography of Schopenhauer is the last work that he began to write for “ ZhZL" Arseny Vladimirovich Gulyga (author of biographies of Kant, Hegel, Schelling) and which was completed by his wife and co-author Iskra Stepanovna Andreeva.