Opening
There is something about this season that has to be admitted.
When I watch Andrei Talalaev finishing sixth with Baltika — with this blue-and-white team of ours, as boring to the neutral as a well-run factory floor can be boring — one parallel from a completely different field keeps coming to mind. I think of Shnurov. I know the comparison is strange, but I cannot shake it. In the early 2000s respectable publications wrote the same thing about Leningrad, and rather squeamishly: swearing, drink, a tavern, zero culture, clowning for drunken corporate parties. At best "a phenomenon of its time", implying the time would pass and the phenomenon would evaporate. Fifteen years later it turned out that his songs had been quoted to pieces, including by people who would never admit to liking Shnurov out loud — and that he had sung about that decade more accurately than half of those who were considered real artists at the time.
