Art Moscow Museums Observations Science Humour

Monster skeleton at the Darwin Museum is an artwork by Masha Bogoraz

Good Lord, What Are You?

The Darwin Museum has acquired the skeleton of some unimaginable monster. According to the legend, the artefact was discovered by Darwin in the Galápagos Islands and then brought to the American Museum of Natural History, where it was unearthed by a Russian scholar, Vladimir Bogoraz, curator of the ethnographic collection from 1899 to 1904, whom I, for one, cite some five times in my dissertation.

So what is this wild contraption? It is the work of the contemporary Russian artist Masha Bogoraz, an actual relative of that very researcher, from the exhibition “Museum of Artificial History”, organised by graduates of the joint master's programme of the Higher School of Economics and Garage

Report a translation error

September digest: archaeological finds, exhibitions, museums, theatre and the Church

In the finale of the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic, the Golden Ball is told: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to offend nobody, but the digest really does come free of charge. So, here is the main business of the

Frederic Leighton

Frederic Leighton. “Daedalus and Icarus”, 1869 Daedalus warns his son not to climb too high: the heat of the sun may melt the wax, but Icarus is already gazing into the distance, and the lamentations of a foolish old man interest him not in the least

Monster skeleton at the Darwin Museum is an artwork by Masha Bogoraz

Read more

September digest: archaeological finds, exhibitions, museums, theatre and the Church

Frederic Leighton

Attempts to resolve the problems of many years of uncontrolled mass migration

Characters from Gogol's "Petersburg Tales" on the pedestal of the monument to Nikolai Gogol on Nikitsky Boulevard, photograph of the 1960s