Books · Observations · Mores
“Drink to me alone with your eyes... and, please, do not spill the wine, but add water to it and, raising the cup to your lips, fill it with kisses and pass it to the thirsty” (XXXIII, 5-7). “I sent you a wreath of roses not to do you
Archive · Books · Humour
There is a tale that after his death the archive of the Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov was kept by another Russian philosopher, Pavel Florensky. True, Florensky stored Rozanov's papers in a shed, explaining that he could not abide the aroma of those manuscripts.
Books · Observations · Mores · Rome
What the Romans wore, how they furnished their houses and what they talked about, we can picture quite well; but what an ordinary Roman dinner looked like came as a revelation to me personally. In one epigram Martial lists the dainties prepared for his table, inviting a friend to a
Books · Observations · Mores · Rome
Continuing the tale of cult gastronomic haunts, I recalled a Roman café founded in 1760. The cosy Antico Caffe Greco, beside the Spanish Steps, was frequented by Stendhal, Casanova, Andersen and Schopenhauer. The walls of this little coffee house are hung with portraits of its world-famous habitués and adorned
Books · Observations · Mores
GAYEV. Once, sister, you and I slept in this very room, and now I am fifty-one years old, strange as it may seem... LOPAKHIN. Yes, time goes on. GAYEV. What? LOPAKHIN. Time, I say, goes on. GAYEV. And it smells of patchouli here. As for this «patchouli» in The
Cinema · Books · Mores
Gender of the Day: Enchanted April. Strange as it may seem, gloom, private misfortunes and dramas retreat into the background with the coming of the sun. Whoever you may be, a disenchanted madonna or an elderly prude, a deserted society beauty or an ecstatic little ingénue, April is always a
Books · Moscow · Observations · Mores · Saint Petersburg
The much-discussed “Kofemania” and its clientele are not merely a portrait of our times. Whenever I visit one of my favourite branches, the one on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, I find myself, for some reason, transported into the atmosphere of the celebrated nineteenth-century Petersburg coffee house of “Wolff and Béranger”
Books · Museums · New York · Pop Culture
The Twelve Chairs mentions a haughty Vanderbilt lady from a French fashion magazine. “The glossy photograph showed the daughter of the American billionaire Vanderbilt in an evening gown. There were furs and feathers, silk and pearls, a cut of extraordinary lightness and a dizzying coiffure.” In other photographs the Vanderbilt
Books · Observations · Mores · Humour
Tanya is Tatyana Andreyevna Bers-Kuzminskaya, Lev Nikolayevich's sister-in-law, who also lived at Yasnaya Polyana; Sonya is his wife, Sofya Andreyevna. Agreed, it is hard, even with the greatest effort, to believe that these women could have been the prototypes of Natasha. For my part, I
Archive · Books · Observations · Society
"A small room, plain, petty-bourgeois. Stalin is drunk, 'blind drunk', as they say. There are only men in the room; of the peasants, myself and one other, black-bearded. Without a word, Vissarionovich threw the black-bearded peasant down, covered him with a sheet and raped
Archive · Books · Museums · Observations · Society
File on Telegram I have long wanted to tell you about one project of the Museum of the History of the Gulag: colleagues, together with the Memory Foundation, have created a collection of graphic novellas based on the recollections of people who passed through the cauldron of Stalinist repression. The
Books · Observations · Mores · Ethnography
Kipling's poem on bee customs, in translation. It should be understood that this is not purely a fairy tale, talking bees aside, of course. Otherwise it describes a way of life that really existed: one shared with the bees not only the news but the gossip too, the