Annotation: The title of the first book published by the Franco-American philosopher Rene Girard already contained all the pathos of his thought: "romanticism" for him is not so much a trend in European art as an illusion that a person is free in his desires; the "novel" is not a literary genre, but a "revelation" exposing our radical dependence on the Other. Enlisting the support of the great writers – Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust and Dostoevsky – the author creates a conceptual story of desire from the early modern era to the present day, from playful imitation of the "sun king" Louis XIV to the gloomy hatred of all against all that gripped the 20th century. The European novel becomes for Girard a guide through the human soul, which moves from vanity, envy, and imitation of one's neighbor to liberation, which comes to the hero on his deathbed. If in subsequent books Girard discusses culture and the world as a whole, then his first book is his only work in which there is a place for the life and death of an individual. Explicitly or in a reduced form, all the fundamental ideas of the philosopher are already present in this first book: the mimetic principle, the sacrificial crisis, the scapegoat mechanism, and religion’s role in all of these.