NB! · Archive · Art · Books
Illustration from The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan, one of the first female writers of the Middle Ages, early fifteenth century. Reason, Rectitude and Justice help Christine de Pizan to build the City of Ladies
Books · Observations · Mores · People
In 1919 Marina Tsvetaeva wrote the poem "To You, a Hundred Years Hence", addressed to an admirer from the distant future. Piercing and lyrical at once, sad yet spirited. "Friend! Do not look for me! Another fashion! Not even the old folk remember me." In this
Books · People
To You, in a Hundred Years. To you, who are to be born A century hence, when I have breathed my last – From the very depths – like one condemned to death, I write with my own hand: – Friend! do not look for me! Another fashion! Even the old men do
Aristocracy · Books · Mores
Prince Ivan Mikhailovich Dolgorukov recalled how, as a child, he was allowed to go and watch the wedding of Vladimir Poluektov and Ekaterina Argamakova, where he met Katerina Obukhova. The two fell in love on the spot and there and then resolved to become bridegroom and bride, in token whereof
Books · Observations · Mores
Othello gave his young wife a rather modest gift, an embroidered handkerchief that had come to him from his mother, which in the end played a fatal part, being planted on the jealous Moor's comrade as a token of infidelity. With this handkerchief everything is very far from
In the Press · Books · Mores · Ethnography · Humour
What is better to give one's beloved: sperm whale teeth, a leg of lamb, a little gold, or a bouquet of tulips in the old-fashioned way? In the pre-holiday Kommersant Style supplement I have mused on the place of gifts in the annals of world culture.
Archive · Books · Observations · Mores · Rome
Michel de Montaigne's journal for February 1581 mentions a Muscovite ambassador in Rome, dressed in a crimson cloak, a cassock of gold brocade, a nightcap-shaped hat of gold brocade trimmed with fur, and a skufia of silvery linen, who had come to ask Pope Gregory to help
Books · Observations · Humour
In his "Historical and Critical Fragments", Mikhail Pogodin has an amusing phrase dating from 1846, setting the Renaissance West against Muscovite Rus': "... with them propaganda, with us preservation, with them movement, with us tranquillity...". It makes one smile that today these words would most likely
Books · Observations · Society
On the history shelf at the Fnac in Nantes, next to "The Real Novel of Gorbachev", stands a book about Brezhnev, the new work of Andrei Kozovoi, a French historian of Soviet origin who specialises in the Cold War and its manifestations in culture. This history of Brezhnev
Books · Paris
Victor Hugo's poem “Ce siècle avait deux ans! Rome remplaçait Sparte” is best known in Russian in the translation by Valery Bryusov, which begins with this stanza: Our century was two years old; Rome was replacing Sparta: Napoleon was already showing through Bonaparte, And the narrow mask that
Archive · Art · Books · People
Do not tell me you have ever seen a more bewitchingly frail image of a writer in infancy than this engraving, "The Birth of Victor Hugo", of 1881, from the collections of the municipal library of Besançon, where the future classic of world literature came into the world
Archive · Books · Mores · Humour
"On Wednesday he called them hangmen, And on Thursday, tempted by their victuals, He was polishing their boots at «Nakanune». That service did not go unrewarded: A count, a landowner and a bourgeois squared, He is now being published by «Gosizdat»" Literal translation Sasha Chorny, A.N. Tolstoy,