Faith · Books · Palaeontology · Nature
On Permian shoals the damp chalk glimmers With the purple mother-of-pearl of an ammonite. It is the gleam of ancient dawns turned to stone, Time has grown horny. Here lie hidden The bones of the beast-like. Their decline Preceded the flowering of the dinosaurs, But it did
The East · Interviews · Books · Museums · Heritage · People · Saint Petersburg
I met Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky after the presentation of his book at the Peredelkino House of Creativity. After several hours with the public, an autograph session and filming, the legendary Piotrovsky nonetheless received me with energy and good humour. I tried not to ask the questions that every journalist has
Faith · Books · Observations
The Iliad begins, quite literally, with a hecatomb, literally "a hundred oxen", offered to the gods before battles and after victories. It is a recurring motif throughout the whole epic. But the truly richest material on the sacrifice of cattle is to be found in the Old Testament.
Coming Up · Books · Moscow
The Bolshoi Theatre Encyclopaedia to Be Published in Summer 2026. The publication is timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Bolshoi Theatre, which will be celebrated in 2026. The encyclopaedia will comprise three volumes. The first is devoted to the theatre's conductors, directors, designers, choreographers and
Archive · Books · Moscow · Mores · People
Tyutcheva is beginning to please me quietly... Little by little, but she has taken hold of me seriously and wholly So Leo Tolstoy recalls Ekaterina Tyutcheva in his diary. In my alternative historical imagination I sometimes wonder what would have happened had Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy in fact married Ekaterina Tyutcheva,
Art · Books · Science
In the final and highest judgement there is no other Being but will. Will is primal Being, to which alone all the predicates of Being apply: groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation. All philosophy strives to find this expression Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Illustration: Rembrandt's etching "
Books · Society
If the land belonged to a bank or a trust, the intermediary would say: the bank, the trust needs this and that; the bank, the trust insists, demands… – as though the bank or the trust were some kind of monsters, endowed with the ability to think and feel, monsters that
Archive · Faith · Art · Books
And it came to pass after that, in the second year, that Pharaoh dreamed a dream: he seemed to stand upon the bank of the river, by the river. And behold, as it were out of the river came up seven kine, fair to look upon and fat in flesh,
Art · Books · Science · Society
In 1921 Walter Benjamin wrote a short text, "Critique of Violence", which is now counted among the most uncomfortable philosophical texts of the twentieth century. Because it describes a mechanism we have grown accustomed not to notice. Benjamin distinguishes two kinds of violence. The first is law-making
NB! · Books · Observations · People
"Why do you think, Rozanov, that you have understood more of Egypt than all the Egyptologists?" "Because I am astonished. And they, you see, are never astonished by anything."
Archive · Architecture · Books · Education · Society · Saint Petersburg
In February 1937 the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers opened in the Anichkov Palace, today the Saint Petersburg City Palace of Youth Creativity. Before that, after the Revolution, the city museum had existed here for a short time; it was closed in 1925, and until 1927 the same premises also housed
Books · People
I have forgotten the word I meant to say. The blind swallow will return to the palace of shadows On clipped wings, to play with the transparent ones. In oblivion the night song is sung. And on the lips, like black ice, there burns And torments the memory. The word