Archive · Geography · Books · Society

...yet there are many remote places in Russia, five hundred versts and more without a town, veritable refuges for brigands and all manner of fugitive and passportless people

...yet there are many remote places in Russia, five hundred versts and more without a town, veritable refuges for brigands and all manner of fugitive and passportless people. An example may be seen in the wooded expanse around the river Vetluga, which, stretching seven hundred versts in its course from

Archive · Observations · Mores · Ethnography

A herdsman with a barabanka and mallets calls the cattle in a photograph by Zakhar Vinogradov

A drummer-shepherd calls the herd at dawn in a photograph of 1910-11 by Zakhar Vinogradov, from the series “In the Lands Beyond the Volga and Along the Vetluga”. The historic photograph captures a shepherd summoning the herd at dawn with the help of traditional Russian wooden instruments, the

Aristocracy · Archive · Books · Observations · New York · Society · Paris · Saint Petersburg

Strange as it may seem, Pushkin and Eugene Onegin are mentioned in Epstein's correspondence

Strange as it may seem, Pushkin and Eugene Onegin are mentioned in Epstein's correspondence. The context is yet another girl whom he is being urged to take on. It is reported that she is connected to the Russian imperial family, and that her great-great-grandfather, a certain

Archive · Society · People

Boris Yeltsin's 1992 family tree traces back to Anika Yeltsyn of the 18th century

The Descendants of Anika Sergeyev, Son of Yeltsyn. The family tree of Boris Yeltsin, compiled by Dmitry Panov and published in 1992 in Perm by the Association of Amateur Genealogists, goes back to Anika Sergeyev, son of Yeltsyn, who lived in the middle of the eighteenth century. The family hails

Archive · Mores · People

Fyodor Shalyapin on a Finnish kicksled visiting Ilya Repin in Kuokkala, February 1914

Feodor Chaliapin visiting Ilya Repin in February 1914. Vyborg Governorate, the village of Kuokkala. Chaliapin stands on the runners of a Finnish kicksled, a conveyance extremely popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Sweden, Finland, Norway and the northern provinces of Russia. The design is as follows:

Archive · Observations · Society · Humour

Should any boyar, okolnichy, Duma man, clerk (dyak), or other judge, whether for bribes, for friendship, or for enmity, convict the innocent plaintiff or defendant and acquit the guilty, and the matter be proven true, then from such judges the plaintiff's

Should any boyar, okolnichy, Duma man, clerk (dyak), or other judge, whether for bribes, for friendship, or for enmity, convict the innocent plaintiff or defendant and acquit the guilty, and the matter be proven true, then from such judges the plaintiff's claim shall be recovered threefold and given

Archive · Books · People · Pop Culture

Joan Crawford in My Way of Life on mistakes, bitterness and generosity

Joan Crawford on her way to the launch of her book in Boston, November 1971. I am the sum of everything that has ever happened to me, every mistake I have made and every tear I have shed, though I have tried to keep them few, and I have never

Archive · Faith · Moscow · Observations · Heritage

Bolshevik firing position in the bell tower of a church on Ostozhenka in 1917

A barricade set up in the autumn of 1917 across Ostozhenka, by the Church of the Resurrection of the Word. In the bell tower of the church is a Bolshevik firing point. This is dreadful not only as a fact of civil war but as a symbol. A bell tower,

NB! · Archive · Art · Pop Culture

The January 1929 Cover of Vogue

Archive · Architecture · Books · Moscow · Museums · Science

Daniele Barbaro's marginalia found in the 1511 Vitruvius edition at the Pushkin Museum

The Pushkin Museum has summed up the results of the "Moscow Vitruvius" project. At the centre of attention of art historians, bibliographers, historians, palaeographers and even graphologists was a rare folio: an edition of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio's treatise Ten Books on Architecture, printed in Venice in

Archive · Architecture · Art · Museums · Observations · Paris

The term “Art Deco” is an abbreviation of the French Arts Décoratifs from the official title of the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts

The term “Art Deco” is an abbreviation of the French Arts Décoratifs from the official title of the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. To mark the centenary, the exhibition Paris 1925 has opened at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in the Trocadéro, in

Old black-and-white photograph of a bespectacled man holding the head of a tiger figure frame with bared teeth.

Archive · Science · People · Nature

A craftsman works on the frame of a stuffed Amur tiger at a nature reserve, Primorsky Krai, 1960s

Mikhail Yakovlevich Volkov, Taxidermist of the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve. Most likely with the frame for a future figure of a tiger: the reserve is, after all, one of the world's principal centres for the study and protection of the Amur tiger Primorsky Krai, 1960s