The book of Mark Lipovetsky represents a “dotted line” history of transformation of modernism into postmodernism, and of further mutations of the latter in the post-Soviet culture.

According to the researcher, “paralogies”, or, in other words, a mentality beyond the norms and borders of the generally accepted cultural logics, was a stable foundation for that process. Heuristic and esthetic possibilities of “paralogies” of the Russian (post) modernism have been revealed in the book, first of all by means of a thorough analysis of a broad range of the cultural phenomena: from Vaginov, Mandelstam, Kharms and Nabokov to Rubinstein, Tolstaya and Girshovich; from Pelevin, Sorokin and Akunin to Bruskin and The Blue Noses Group; as well as a range of films and plays of the recent time. At the same time the author has developed a dynamic theory of the Russian postmodernism which allows to include this development in the context of the Russian culture and to determine the meaning of the postmodernist ethics as a necessary phase in the historical development of modernism.