The three-volume Collected Works of the English writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) is the most complete published in Russian. The famous esthete and dandy of the end of the last century, who amused everyone with his extravagance and admired his paradoxes, a man who pursued beauty and sensual pleasures, but in the end knew humiliation and prison, Wilde became a symbolic figure for the decadence of the end of the last century. His amazing talent for conversation was reflected in plays that have not yet left the stage, reflections on the relationship between beauty and life took the form of the philosophical novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and the dying awareness of “the meaning and beauty of Suffering” came to us in that desperate cry from -behind the prison walls, which, having been fully published only relatively recently, received the title “De Profundis”. A characteristic figure of the end of the last century, Wilde opens up new facets at the end of the present century.