Does the concept of 'contemporary art in St. Petersburg' make sense? After all, contemporary art itself is being consigned to museums with each passing decade, and its location is never static. Meanwhile, the St. Petersburg text has been growing for centuries, and therefore the city is a source of thought in artistic events. The axis of Ekaterina Andreeva's book is drawn through those artistic events that are interconnected by the task of exploring and transporting images into the future that protect life from entropy. It passes through layers of the avant-garde of the 1910s, the nonconformism of the 1940s–1980s, and the art of the new reality of the 1990s–2010s, intersecting with the personal stories of Mikhail Matyushin, Alexander Arefyev, Evgeny Mikhnov, Konstantin Simun, Timur Novikov, and other artist-thinkers who transform life through the constant 'shaping of themselves,' through the re-creation of the cosmos. This book, compiled from articles from the 1990s–2010s, explores the interplay of St. Petersburg's topos and logos in the turbulent history of modern times. Ekaterina Andreeva is a PhD candidate in art history, a doctor of philosophy, an art historian, and a curator, as well as a leading researcher in the Department of Contemporary Art at the State Russian Museum.