Art · Moscow · Museums · Humour

On Gogolevsky Boulevard, Napoleon Plays Chess with His Uncle, Cardinal Mozef Fesch

On Gogolevsky Boulevard, Napoleon plays chess with his uncle, Cardinal Mozef Fesch. Bonaparte is losing. In fact, though, Jean-Georges Vibert's painting "Check!" is kept at the Haggin Museum in California

The East · Science · Society · People

Alexander Chizhevsky linked wars and revolutions to solar activity

US Intervention in the Middle East Mapped onto the 11-Year Solar Cycle of Sunspot Activity. The theory linking warfare and revolutionary outbreaks on earth with the activity of the sun was first advanced by the Russian Soviet scientist Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964), a biophysicist and the founder of

NB! · Art · People

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), David Hockney, 1972

A young woman with a high updo and large hoop earrings reaches up to a rope with wooden beads. She wears a black tie-front top and a white ruffled skirt; the backdrop is red-orange.

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Studio shoot: model in a black top and white skirt against a red backdrop

NB! · Observations · Pop Culture · Humour

The Circus Mood of Ulyana Sergeyenko's New Resort Collection: I Demand a Continuation of the Poodle's Story

Archive · Moscow · Museums · Heritage

The Evacuation of Museum Collections from the Western Regions of the USSR Began in the First Days of the Great Patriotic War

The evacuation of museum collections from the western regions of the USSR began in the first days of the Great Patriotic War. The rapidity of the advance and the appalling scenes of destruction visited by the Germans upon monuments of history and culture left no other choice. The museums had

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Architecture · Museums · Science · Paris · Saint Petersburg

The world's largest Foucault pendulum in St Isaac's Cathedral operated until 1986

In 1931, a Foucault pendulum, the invention of a French astronomer of 1851 that demonstrates the rotation of the Earth, was installed beneath the dome of Saint Isaac's Cathedral. And if the pendulum that Jean Foucault hung beneath the dome of the Paris Panthéon on a 67-metre

Archive · Faith · Observations · Saint Petersburg

A Te Deum in the Colonnade Hall of the Tauride Palace before the opening of the Fourth State Duma, 15 November 1912

This is how it ought to be in the largest Orthodox country in the world, and not twice a year on feast days

Faith · The East · Art

Legend of Khidr helping Zul-Qarnayn find the spring of living water in Central Asia

Khidr and Alexander the Great Watch a Spring of Living Water Restore a Salted Fish to Life. According to legend, Khidr, the great preacher who travelled over water standing on a fish, helped the great Emperor Dhul-Qarnayn find the magical spring of life-giving water somewhere in Central Asia.

Observations · Ethnography · Humour

In an ancient game-song, a sparrow or a drake entertains the audience by imitating how children, merchants, lads, girls and old women walk and caper about in dance

Old women all go like this: hunched over, stooping low. And girls go like this: perked up, merry-making, perked up, and clap your hands! Let us commit it to memory. Hunched over or perked up. And above all, do not mix them up.

Faith · Society · Rome

Pope Leo XIV posts photos from a visit to the Vatican Radio transmission centre, an extraterritorial possession of the Vatican in the Santa Maria di Galeria area, 18 kilometres north-west of the centre of Rome

And do you know, it is quite an enviable plot of land, 430 hectares in extent, ten times the size of the Vatican itself, which covers 44 hectares. The visit of Leo XIV, together with officials of the Dicastery for Communication and the office of the Governorate of Vatican City

Alexandr Radayev