Incorporating contemporary Russian art into the context of 20th-century aesthetic experience is the main objective of Alexei Parshchikov's collection of essays. The renowned poet writes about new possibilities of perception and unexpected transformations of meanings.

The subjects of his essays include poetry, photography, video art, and arthouse cinema. The protagonists are Ivan Zhdanov and Matthew Barney, Alexander Yeryomenko and Liisa Roberts, Ilya Kutik and Ted Hughes, Sergei Solovyov and Yevgeny Dybskiy, Alexander Ilichesky and Igor Ganikovsky.

Parshchikov's endeavor to simultaneously showcase different levels of reality allows him to present scenes from his youthful days in Kyiv and the literary life of Moscow in the early 1980s in the form of remarkable pictures. The book equally features a fantastical film story and an annotated translation of a poem by American poet Michael Palmer.

Regardless of the topic, Parshchikov's aesthetic reflection is always self-aware within the context of the grand European tradition, where Dante, Thomas Aquinas, and Leonardo da Vinci are as relevant as poets who debuted in the 1990s or early 2000s.