Archive · Art · Humour

Sacralizers made from everyday objects to protect the inner from the outer

Viktor Pivovarov: "Sacralisers", 1979. Sacralisers are special protective devices for guarding the "inner" against the "outer". Sacralisers may be the most ordinary household objects. Equipped with a sacraliser (a frying pan hung on the nose, say, and shoe brushes on the ears), one may

Page from an old printed edition of Pushkin's poem “Imitation of Anacreon”, signed A. Pushkin.

NB! · Art · Books · Mores · People

Pushkin declares his love to Olenina in “Imitation of Anacreon”

"Young mare!": this is how Pushkin declares his love to Olenina, the very one with the samovar. Promising, of course, to tame her with a "shortened bridle".

Archive · Art · Books · Moscow · Museums · Humour

Pushkin's 1828 letter to Delvig about children expecting to meet a sugar poet

The other day a neighbour gave a gathering, and I was due to attend. The children of his kinswoman, a spoilt set of urchins, insisted on going too; their mother brought them raisins and prunes and thought to slip away from them quietly, but Pyotr Markovich (Poltoratsky) stirred them up;

Art · Books · Observations · Humour

The heroine of Pushkin’s “Winter Morning” in poems by Zhukovsky, Lvov and Kornilov

One is tempted to write: time to wake, beauty, wake! Let us try to wake my terracotta Venus together. Frost and sunshine; a glorious day! You are still slumbering, lovely friend: Time to wake, beauty, wake! Open your eyes, closed in languor, To meet the northern Aurora, Appear as the

NB! · Aristocracy · Art · Books · Humour

A Fourteenth-Century Rave, or the Visconti Hours of Gian Galeazzo

Architecture · Art · Moscow · Museums · Observations

A Masterly Exhibition of Francisco Infante Opens at the New Tretyakov

A masterly exhibition of Francisco Infante has opened at the New Tretyakov. "Metaphors of Infinity" is a colossal retrospective of Infante's entire oeuvre, from the earliest works to the newest series. What strikes one first is the extraordinary architecture: no walls at all, every work hovers

Archive · Art · Society

Poster for the Blue Bird, one of the best-known Russian cabaret theatres in Europe, by Ivan Bilibin

The Russian theatre was founded in Paris in 1921 and run by Yakov Yuzhny, at one time celebrated as a compère and teller of Jewish stories. Yuzhny toured extensively with the Blue Bird, which was enormously popular in Germany, but by the 1930s something had to be decided: to practise