“Today you don’t hear revolutionaries. All the smarter brides are trying to leave Ivanovo for the capital. Textile factories have been converted into shopping centers. Private (small and medium) businesses are struggling by hook or by crook - from the middle to the halves. “The city is not the best,” the Kaveen members joke. The newspapers write: “a depressed, subsidized region,” a city of bad luck. But the people of Ivanovo don’t care!” Dmitry Faleev's book consists of essays, stories and sketches that form a real epic dedicated to his native Ivanov. The “underground city,” as the author himself calls it, turns out to be much more complex and diverse than it might seem to an outsider: gypsy camps and meeting places for underground artists, protected nature and “places of glory” of the 1990s coexist here. Faleev looks at Ivanovo through the eyes of an anthropologist-researcher who, unexpectedly for himself, moves from observing exotic communities to studying his native landscapes and rediscovering them. Paying special attention to the local artistic and cultural environment, the author describes the rich history of local culture during a difficult transition period. Like the city to which it is dedicated, this book resembles a multi-component and living organism that is not reduced to the sum of its parts, but turns out to be larger and more complex than it. Dmitry Faleev is a writer, journalist, laureate of the Debut Prize, author of the novel The Formula of Everything, published by the UFO publishing house.