Is there any meaning in the concept of “contemporary art of St. Petersburg”? After all, modern art itself is handed over to museums every decade, and the place where it takes place never changes. Meanwhile, the St. Petersburg text has been growing for centuries, and therefore the city is a birthplace of thought in artistic events. The axis of Ekaterina Andreeva’s book is drawn through those art events that are interconnected by the task of reconnaissance and transportation into the future of images that insure life against entropy. It passes through the layers of the avant-garde of the 1910s, nonconformism of the 1940s–1980s, the art of the new reality of the 1990s–2010s, crossing the personal stories of Mikhail Matyushin, Alexander Arefiev, Evgeny Mikhnov, Konstantin Simun, Timur Novikov, and other artist-thinkers who transform life in the constant “formation of oneself”, in the re-creation of the cosmos. The plot of this book, compiled from articles from 1990–2010, is the interaction of St. Petersburg topos and logos in the turbulent history of modern times. Ekaterina Andreeva – Candidate of Art History, Doctor of Philosophy, art historian and curator, leading researcher at the Department of Contemporary Trends of the State Russian Museum.