The actor Sergei Dreiden (Dontsov) has died today. I remember him from two roles: in Kirill Serebrennikov's recent "Petrov's Flu" and in Yury Mamin's good old "Window to Paris"

Though not, in my view, the best known of films, "Window to Paris" is one of the important, truly Russian pictures. Very delicate and funny, tragic, absurd and bitterly truthful.

A prim old lady hides a magical secret in her room in a grimy, noisy communal flat: on certain days her window opens onto Paris. Her loathsome neighbours worm the secret out of her and burst onto the Champs-Élysées in a gale of rubbish, straight from a Petersburg back alley. Sergei Dreiden plays the only person who was able to feel the wonder of this magical passage from Russian to European reality.

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At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free. So, here is 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

The actor Sergei Dreiden (Dontsov) has died today. I remember him from two roles: in Kirill Serebrennikov's recent "Petrov's Flu" and in Yury Mamin's good old "Window to Paris"

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At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

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