It happens, you open a book, and there's an article you should have written, but you've already been beaten to it. This is exactly what happened to me with the collection The Soviet Myth in Post-Soviet Russia, where I discovered Alexei Semanenko's text Inside Lapanko: Alternative Soviet Mythologies, dedicated to the series "Inside Lapanko" and how the image of the Soviet past is built through it. True, the text itself is structured in a rather strange way, since a considerable part of it is devoted to trying to explain to a foreign reader who an engineer, journalist or Rosa Robot is and why everything that happens on the screen should be funny. In my opinion, the mission is doomed to failure. Much more interesting is the research part of the article, where Semanenko considers Lepanko's universe as a special way of constructing historical time. Anton Lepanko was born in 1986, and Alexei Smirnov in 1983, so their ideas about the late Soviet Union were formed mainly from childhood impressions. To describe this effect, Semenenko uses the concept of an ochronic chronotope. Ochronia posits the existence of an imaginary historical time in which normal chronology ceases to apply. In Lapanko's world, a late Soviet research institute coexists quietly with crime gangs from 1990s movies, psychics on television, and cultural images of the following decades. It turns out that this is a kind of alternative history, in which the Soviet Union never completely ended, and the nineties began within it. At the same time, the nineties get an unexpected restoration, since that's where the series borrows a significant part of its energy. The crime cinema and the musical underground become material for creative play, and the era itself appears as a space of unpredictability where the most amazing events are possible. Semanenko sees here an alternative to the usual story about the nineties as a time of chaos and decay.

It happens, you open a book, and there's an article you should have written, but you've already been beaten to it. This is exactly what happened to me with the collection The Soviet Myth in Post-Soviet Russia, where I discovered Alexei Semanenko's text Inside Lapanko: Alternative Soviet Mythologies, dedicated to the series "Inside Lapanko" and how the image of the Soviet past is built through it. True, the text itself is structured in a rather strange way, since a considerable part of it is devoted to trying to explain to a foreign reader who an engineer, journalist or Rosa Robot is and why everything that happens on the screen should be funny. In my opinion, the mission is doomed to failure. Much more interesting is the research part of the article, where Semanenko considers Lepanko's universe as a special way of constructing historical time. Anton Lepanko was born in 1986, and Alexei Smirnov in 1983, so their ideas about the late Soviet Union were formed mainly from childhood impressions. To describe this effect, Semenenko uses the concept of an ochronic chronotope. Ochronia posits the existence of an imaginary historical time in which normal chronology ceases to apply. In Lapanko's world, a late Soviet research institute coexists quietly with crime gangs from 1990s movies, psychics on television, and cultural images of the following decades. It turns out that this is a kind of alternative history, in which the Soviet Union never completely ended, and the nineties began within it. At the same time, the nineties get an unexpected restoration, since that's where the series borrows a significant part of its energy. The crime cinema and the musical underground become material for creative play, and the era itself appears as a space of unpredictability where the most amazing events are possible. Semanenko sees here an alternative to the usual story about the nineties as a time of chaos and decay.