NB! · Archive · Architecture · Faith · The East · Art · Education

Sketches for a Catholic church in the Chinese style, created by the Benedictine monk Adelbert Gresnigt and published in the bulletin of the Catholic University of Peking in the 1920s

Archive · Art · Moscow · People

Tolstoy's Friendship with Paolo Trubetskoy and His Sculpted Portraits of the Writer

"Lev Nikolaevich is being modelled all the time by Trubetskoy, and the bust is very good: majestic, characteristic and true" - Sofya Andreyevna Tolstaya, diary entry of 16 - 23 April 1898. The friendly relations between Tolstoy and Trubetskoy are, in general, well known. Lev Nikolayevich liked the artist'

NB! · Archive · Monarchies · People

Tsarevich George Alexandrovich, third son of Emperor Alexander III, resting and dozing at a picnic in the spring of 1894

Black-and-white photograph of a crowd on Red Square with market tents and a large bunch of balloons before the Historical Museum.

NB! · Archive · Faith · Moscow · Observations · Ethnography

Palm Sunday on Red Square in 1896 and the 1910s, with market stalls and festivities

Palm Sunday celebrations on Red Square in 1896 and in the 1910s. Trading stalls were set up on Red Square, with festive revelry and Palm Sunday sleigh rides. And today?

Archive · Monarchies · Moscow

Ivan the Terrible receives a Danish embassy after the 1575 seizure of Livonian fortresses

Ivan the Terrible receives the Danish ambassadors together with his eldest son. Before the audience, the bailiffs strictly forbade the ambassadors to recite the titles of their king ahead of the titles of the Prince of Moscow, reminding them that envoys who had once broken this rule had been expelled

Archive · Monarchies · Society · People

Sire, Give Freedom to the Russian Word

Sire, give freedom to the Russian word. Our intellect is cramped, our thought poisons our breast for want of space, it groans in the stocks of the censorship. Give us free speech... we have something to say to the world and to our own people. < > Wash from Russia

NB! · Archive · Books · Observations · Nature

Futuristic Beehives from an Eighteenth-Century Book

Futuristic beehives from an eighteenth-century book. Whenever I look at pictures like these, I have the feeling that some two hundred and fifty years ago humanity took a wrong turning somewhere, and I look at pictures like these constantly

NB! · Archive · Art · Science · People

Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was also a rather good artist

Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was also a rather good artist. In this photograph of 1979, Leonov is at work on his painting “The Voskhod 2 Spacecraft”

A skeleton in a plumed hat and orange cloak rides a horse across a battlefield, with pikemen and a cannon behind and ravens in the foreground.

NB! · Archive · Art

In 1911 Edgar Bundy depicted Death as a mounted general on a battlefield

Death in the guise of a general on horseback on the battlefield. Edgar Bundy, 1911

Aristocracy · Archive · Moscow · Mores

Moscow Balls in the Winter of 1814 and 1815 in a Letter by Sofya Volkova

The Moscow winter Seasons of 1814-15 were brighter and richer than the pre-war Seasons of 1810-11. This is understandable: people were exhausted by the hardships of war, by ruin, by universal gloom and endless mourning, and when the time came, they returned to life with new and

NB! · Archive · People

David Lynch Holds the Firewood with His Father

Black-and-white photograph of a moustached man in a checked jacket, barefoot and without trousers, seated on a stool playing a harmonium.

Archive · Art · Paris · Humour

Paul Gauguin plays the harmonium without trousers at Alphonse Mucha's in 1893

What to Do of an Evening in Paris? Paul Gauguin, trouserless, plays the harmonium at a house party at Alphonse Mucha's; the year is 1893