I would like to take a peek, even just a little: Essays about utopia and nostalgia in post-Soviet pop music

The book of Ivan Beletsky is an attempt to tell about the history of popular music (mainly local, but not only) through the prism of its relationship with time. The heroes of this study are nostalgically recall the former, then, on the contrary, they dream about what awaits them ahead, but most importantly, they themselves do not notice how these two seemingly deliberately multidirectional eyes periodically merge into a certain indefinite, hybrid time of Future in The Past, for which in the Russian language there is not even a separate grammatical name. The focus of the author is wide-angle, even panoramic: from Izhevsk electronics to a coin, from “straw raccoons” to Garik Sukachev and from Dark Foll to YouTube series “inside Lapenko”. The latter is only one example of the release of the book outside the narrow -minded discourse: on its pages between the case, both the late Soviet cinema and the architecture of brutalism are analyzed. The methodology corresponds to the wide optics: Beletsky relies on his own interviews with the scene figures, on the theoretical works of Russian and foreign philosophers and culturalists, not forgetting to sometimes check with their own childhood memories, which introduce an additional narrative - personal - personal - plan