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Archive · Art · Museums · People
Repin's studio in his house and his Sunday drawing despite doctors' advice
"...I love art more than virtue, more than people, than my nearest and dearest, than my friends, more than any happiness or joys of our life," from Ilya Repin's letter to the art critic Stasov. In this studio on the first floor of his house Repin
Architecture · Museums · Mores · People
Dining table with a rotating central section at Repin's Penaty estate
Ilya Repin and his wife Natalia Nordman devised an unusual table for their house in the village of Kuokkala, which allowed everyone to sit down to dinner in comfort and required no servants at the feast. This remarkable table, far ahead of its time, had two parts: a moving one
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Domed metal roof with a round lantern, seen from above
Architecture · Museums · Heritage · Saint Petersburg
The Levashovsky Bakery, built in Leningrad in 1933, has become a cultural centre
In 1933 a unique automated bakery was built in Leningrad, in which the bread-making cycle was automated to the greatest possible degree. The conveyor line was arranged in rings set on different floors of the building. Flour was delivered to the very top, where the sourdough department was situated.
The East · Cinema · Society
Guy Ritchie's much-discussed film about an American military operation in Afghanistan, released in Russian cinemas as "The Translator", is in the original still called The Covenant, which means "agreement, compact, testament"
Guy Ritchie's much-discussed film about an American military operation in Afghanistan, released in Russian cinemas as "The Translator", is in the original still called The Covenant, which means "agreement, compact, testament". So the point of the film is not, after all, the mere
Archive · Education · People
The Kerensky and Lenin families were close in Simbirsk, but the sons recalled no meetings
Alexandr Fyodorovich Kerensky and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin may have known each other from early childhood. Their fathers were friends and kept up a close relationship. Kerensky's father was the director of the Simbirsk Classical Gymnasium for Boys, from which Lenin graduated. When Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov died, Fyodor Mikhailovich
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Open book of military regulations in hands, detail of a painting
Archive · Art · Museums · Observations · Society
Military regulations of Nicholas I's reign and a portrait of a boy holding one
Portrait of a Boy with a Book. Unknown artist, first half of the nineteenth century. Collection of the Romanov Museum, Kostroma Museum-Reserve. The book reads: “Military Regulations. Left, forward, march.” Two hundred years have passed, and how familiar the wording still is! The first half of the nineteenth century
Observations · Society · Nature · Ethnography
Cacique Raoni awaits help from French presidents in creating a park in Amazonia
Macron embraces Chief Raoni, founder of the movement to save the Amazon. Thanks to Raoni, 12 foundations for the rescue of the rainforests have been created. One of his main goals is the creation of a national park in Amazonia covering some 180,000 square kilometres, for which he has
Art · Museums · Heritage
"Girl with a Pot of Roses", Vasily Andreyevich Tropinin, 1850
The artist's signature is not easily found on the painting; it is hidden in the decoration of the pot. The canvas was bought in an antique shop in the 1950s as the work of an unknown artist, but the buyer, the art historian Felix Vishnevsky, discovered the concealed
NB! · Faith · People · Rome · Humour
Asked by an Italian television presenter which programmes he enjoyed in his youth, Pope Francis, aged 86, replied: “I'll let you in on a secret
Asked by an Italian television presenter which programmes he enjoyed in his youth, Pope Francis, aged 86, replied: “I'll let you in on a secret. When I was young, we had no television.”