Review of the book by the famous philologist O.V. Bogdanova “Petersburg text of Russian literature (second half of the twentieth century)”, in which the work of Andrei Bitov, Sergei Dovlatov, Mikhail Kuraev, Tatyana Tolstoy, Joseph Brodsky, Victor Pelevin was “registered” in the modern “Petersburg text” of Russian literature. It is shown how in the book each of the writers from a special angle sees St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad, the great city in its special incarnation — artistic, ironic, mystical, fairy-tale-mythological, philosophical, visionary, which predetermined the essayistic style of the review.