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After the Gulag he wrote the novel "The Monkey Comes for Its Skull" (1959), the collection of novellas "The Dark Lady. Three Novellas about Shakespeare" (1969), his finest poems, and, finally, the largely autobiographical novels "The Keeper of Antiquities" (1964) and its sequel, "
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First of all, the inscription cut into the cornelian of Pushkin's ring seemed a riddle. The poet, according to numerous accounts, was convinced of a special, almost magical significance in the incomprehensible words, now referring them to the Kabbalah, now to other mystical formulae, and even assuring his
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“I live in a flat whose doors are guarded by the police round the clock. Nobody is admitted to see me except members of my family. The price my old friend from Gorky pays for knowing us is an interrogation by the KGB after every visit. There is no telephone
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Andrei Sakharov's Nobel certificate. A facsimile copy is on display at the Ground Solyanka gallery
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Once again I find entries on vaccination in nineteenth-century diaries. Our old acquaintance Willem de Clercq, poet, thinker and memoirist from the Netherlands, was in May 1827 extremely troubled by the subject of the smallpox vaccine. Today we know that the discovery of this vaccine changed the world and
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Nancy Reagan shields her husband's head as he, forgetting his recent head surgery, takes off his hat to wave to the crowd. 1989
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Installing a capital on one of the 32 Ionic columns, nearly 13 metres high, on the top of the Civil Courts Building in St. Louis, 1930. The roof of this building was modelled on one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.
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Perhaps not the most intriguing piece of news, but still, to some extent, topical. In the diary of the Dutch poet Willem de Clercq (not to be confused with his exact namesake, the President of South Africa in the 1990s), there is an entry about a sorrowful letter from Beler,
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The Dark One and the Fair One. One can live by Shakespeare in Mariupol. When the Germans entered the dusty town, nothing in life seemed to have changed, for apples were still apples, and a house was still a house, and the October sun went down into the bay just
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“A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence in success that often induces real success,” Sigmund Freud. In this photograph of 1926 Freud is pictured with his mother, Amalia Nathansohn, an Odessan by upbringing, who lived in