Name: Poblamiento del Continente Americano
ISBN: 978-9929-687-90-5

Lithographed caricature of M. E. Saltykov (Shchedrin): a bearded man in spectacles with an enormous head sits at a table, beside two tiny figures.

Archive · Books · Humour

Saltykov-Shchedrin in a letter of 1 October 1858 on the powerlessness of bureaucracy

Here I am in utter distress, for I am surrounded by illiterate and senseless people and must work alone for all of them and set right what a century of chicanery has fouled… With each passing day I grow more and more convinced that bureaucracy is impotent… Saltykov-Shchedrin in

Archive · Books · Moscow · Humour

In one place it is said that a landowner was ruined by doing up his house in Moscow in the fashionable taste

“But the sovereign himself is building a palace in Moscow!” said the censor. Gogol on the censorship of Dead Souls, 1842

NB! · Books · Observations · Humour

Alas, "The Art of Trolling" Turned Out to Be a Book About Fishing from a Moving Boat

Books · Mores · Humour

Pushkin on obligatory family visits at Christmas in Chapter IV of “Eugene Onegin”

Hm! hm! Noble reader, Is all your kin in health? Permit me: perhaps you would care To learn from me just now What relations, properly speaking, are. Relations are people of this sort: We are obliged to caress them, To love them, to respect them from the heart, And, according

Archive · Books · People

Leo Tolstoy at his desk in the study at Yasnaya Polyana in 1908

Photograph by Karl Bulla

Books · Mores · Humour

Preparing Salad Olivier to the recipe of Elena Molokhovets:

hazel grouse, calf's tongue, pressed black caviar (payusnaya), fresh lettuce, boiled crayfish, lobster, pickles (small marinated vegetables), Kabul soy (an old fermented seasoning made from soya beans), cucumbers, capers, hard-boiled eggs, sauce Provençale, salt. In principle, pressed caviar can be replaced by bottarga, the crayfish and lobster

NB! · Faith · Books · Museums · People

Dostoevsky took this New Testament with him to penal servitude in Siberia

Books · Society · People · Saint Petersburg

Dostoevsky and the Petrashevsky Circle, from the 1849 Sentence to the 1857 Pardon

Dostoevsky Was Sentenced to Death by Firing Squad. The sentence on Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was pronounced in November 1849. His offence was participation in the circle of Mikhail Petrashevsky. In the spring of 1849 the circle was broken up. Dostoevsky was arrested together with other participants in the gatherings. For

Books · Society · Humour

Russia is a vast, abundant and wealthy state; but the man in it is a fool, and starves to death in the midst of plenty

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

Books · People

Everything has become heavier and more massive, and so man, too, must become harder, for man must become harder than anything on earth and stand to it as the diamond to glass

Osip Mandelstam

Old black-and-white portrait of a young woman with dark hair parted in the middle.

Books · People

Anna Akhmatova's poem of 1940 on living for the last time

But I warn you, That I am living for the last time. Not as a swallow, nor as a maple, Nor as a reed, nor as a star, Nor as spring water, Nor as a peal of bells, I shall not trouble people And visit other people's dreams

Cinema · Books · Observations

When I think about Joanne Rowling's place in contemporary culture, I recall that a few years ago the most translated author in the world was found to be the English children's writer Enid Blyton

When I think about Joanne Rowling's place in contemporary culture, I recall that a few years ago the most translated author in the world was found to be the English children's writer Enid Blyton. Not Shakespeare, not the Apostles, not Agatha Christie or Daniel Defoe, but