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On the first Saturday of February Mother saw a bumblebee in the window and said, standing in the doorway: Pasha or Sasha, we'll name him. Look, in the middle of the whiteness a bumblebee is flying? That is a good sign. If we don't come back
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📌 For the youngest alchemists of the channel: three magical alphabets 📌 In the Parnassian Mockingbird rubric: a review of Guillermo del Toro's new “Frankenstein” 📌 I tell the story of the recovered jewels of the Habsburg dynasty 📌 In half a century California has built 22 prisons and 1 university; we
Archive · Books · Mores · Education · Saint Petersburg · Humour
Gymnastics for Young Ladies, Adapted to Their Various Ages, for Public and Domestic Education. Adopted as a guide in the Saint Petersburg institutes under the Department of the Institutions of Empress Maria. The author, a doctor of medicine and surgery, described exercises intended specifically for women. The doctor held that
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The Medieval Dog. Strange as it may seem, the symbol @, which Russians call a "dog", appeared long before the internet: it was invented back in the Middle Ages. To economise precious parchment and the copyists' time, monks replaced the frequently occurring Latin preposition "ad" with
NB! · Archive · Art · Books
The Wheel of Fortune in a 15th-century edition of Giovanni Boccaccio's "Fates of Illustrious Men and Women" looks like a fairground carousel, with a king enthroned at the very top while courtiers go flying off the rickety side seats
Faith · Art · Books
The singing shepherd, for a martial feat, Took up no heavy sword, No helmet, no armour of tempered steel, No mail from Saul's shoulder; But, overshadowed by the spirit of God, He took a plain flint in the field - And the foreign-born foe fell, Flashing an. And
Faith · Books · Observations · Rome
Hundreds of young German Catholics in the square shouted "Heil!", stretching out their right arms. Shortly after noon I found myself in St Peter's Square, among several thousand people. From the balcony of the loggia the Supreme Pontiff (Pius XI, Pope from 1922 to 1939) blessed
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By nationality I am Russian, by origin a native proletarian, a hereditary metalworker. That is all that is known of my ancestry In the memoirs of Leonid Brezhnev, which are believed to have been written from his words by several prominent journalists and editors of the day and merely edited
Books · Observations
Modern man has abolished symbolism, and meaning along with it. Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues
Books
Do not reason, do not fuss, Madness seeks, folly judges; Heal the wounds of day with sleep, And what tomorrow brings, will be… While you live, learn to endure it all: Sorrow, and joy, and anxiety. What is there to wish for? What is there to grieve over? The day
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In his youth, Napoleon often skipped meals to save money for books. Napoleonic frugality looked like this: nothing in his room but a bed, an armchair and a mountain of books. The proprietress of the café where he took his meals, seeing his want, often treated the young man to
NB! · Art · Books
Tales of Knights, 1923. The American artist Norman Rockwell