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NB! · Observations
Gravel path in a park in early spring, with patches of snow along the edges
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White gate tower with an arch and wooden tent roof among bare branches
Architecture · Moscow · Observations
One of my favourite buildings in Moscow: the seventeenth-century water-lifting tower at Kolomenskoye
I have always been drawn to its elegance, achieved with rather modest decoration and a simple form. The brick tower is 40 metres high. In its day it served as a gateway in the enclosure wall and supplied water to the Sovereign's Court.
NB! · Art · Books · Mores · People
Pushkin declares his love to Olenina in “Imitation of Anacreon”
"Young mare!": this is how Pushkin declares his love to Olenina, the very one with the samovar. Promising, of course, to tame her with a "shortened bridle".
Archive · Art · Books · Moscow · Museums · Humour
Pushkin's 1828 letter to Delvig about children expecting to meet a sugar poet
The other day a neighbour gave a gathering, and I was due to attend. The children of his kinswoman, a spoilt set of urchins, insisted on going too; their mother brought them raisins and prunes and thought to slip away from them quietly, but Pyotr Markovich (Poltoratsky) stirred them up;
Art · Books · Observations · Humour
The heroine of Pushkin’s “Winter Morning” in poems by Zhukovsky, Lvov and Kornilov
One is tempted to write: time to wake, beauty, wake! Let us try to wake my terracotta Venus together. Frost and sunshine; a glorious day! You are still slumbering, lovely friend: Time to wake, beauty, wake! Open your eyes, closed in languor, To meet the northern Aurora, Appear as the
NB! · Books
In Brief: The New Rules of the "Big Book" Prize
Books · Society
The Big Book literary prize can now be won by an author only once
The Bolshaya Kniga (“Big Book”) literary prize has changed its rules. From now on, the prize may be won only once. That is to say, the case of Yevgeny Vodolazkin, who became its laureate three times, in 2013, 2016 and 2023, or of Leonid Yuzefovich, who received the prize in
NB! · Aristocracy · Art · Books · Humour
A Fourteenth-Century Rave, or the Visconti Hours of Gian Galeazzo
Architecture · Faith · Heritage · Paris
Statue of Saint Christopher destroyed, cathedral made Temple of Reason in the French Revolution
The Statue of Saint Christopher in Notre-Dame. The colossal statue of Saint Christopher, dated to 1433 and standing opposite the pillar by the west entrance of the Cathedral, was destroyed during the French Revolution. The Cathedral was turned into a "Temple of Reason". Inside it they set
NB! · Archive · Monarchies · Saint Petersburg