The book is devoted to the reconstruction and contrastive study of modern ideas of the French and Russians about some fundamentally important ideological categories. These include ideas about fate, chance, luck, knowledge, thinking, soul, mind, conscience, joy, fear, anger and others. In each language, concepts are described not only through an analysis of their meanings and compatibility, but also through their history and “mother” myth. In total, the work analyzes more than fifty concepts of each language, which are considered mutual translation equivalents. The monograph was published in 2008 on the recommendation of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Regional Studies of M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University.