Art · Books
"I was dislocated as a child; you, then, set yourself right!" From the quarrel between Lavretsky and Mikhalevich in Turgenev's "A Nest of the Gentry" Illustration: K. Kashcheev, 1951
Art · Books · Mores
They would often make the slaves drink wine until they were insensible, and lead them out in that state into public places, to show the young men what a hideous spectacle a man presents who has lost his reason to wine. They also made them dance indecent dances and sing
Books · Observations
I ran into a problem: my Kindle has stopped opening books of any kind. Apparently, many people have encountered it. Some managed to restore everything by resetting the device to factory settings, others blame trouble with Amazon's servers. I, for my part, once again thanked God for my
Books · Observations · Science · People
When it comes to the process of self-cognition carried out by absolute thought in the person of man, it is language that turns out to be the privileged form of outward manifestation in which this process both begins and ends. It is in language that thought finally returns to
Faith · Art · Books · Saint Petersburg
I love beneath the vaults a grey-haired quiet, the wandering of requiems and memorial services, and the moving rite to which all are bound: the funeral service at St Isaac's. I love the priest's unhurried step, The broad bearing-out of the winding-sheet, And
Archive · Faith · Books · Nature
And flowers, and bumblebees, and grass, and ears of corn, And azure sky, and noonday heat… The hour will come, and the Lord will ask the prodigal son: “Were you happy in your life on earth?” And I shall forget everything, remembering only these Field paths between the ears of
Faith · Books · Observations · Humour
I don't know about you, but I only like the alphabet of Abraham; Enoch's and Ezra's seem off somehow, over-engineered. Each of these alphabets promises a direct line to heaven. Some to Abraham, some to the angels, and some simply to something of
Cinema · Books · Pop Culture
The actor will appear in the film "The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum", the events of which unfold between Bilbo Baggins's 111th birthday and Gandalf's return to the Shire, just as Saruman's sleuths were searching for Gollum. It is
NB! · Art · Books · Madrid · People
Archive · Books · Humour
The arse, too, is a certain representative of human nature, but it would be absurd for a painter to depict it as a typical attribute of man. Prince Pyotr Andreyevich Vyazemsky in a letter to Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
Art · Books · Observations · Humour
After galloping with me for half a day, she left me beside a forest The eighteenth-century traveller has saddled up the heavily feathered future: he dreamed of wings, but got an ostrich. The engraving from the book Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiques turns out to depict an
Archaeology · Faith · Geography · Books · Science
Plutarch, On the Pythian Oracles Yet neither Plutarch nor Herodotus speaks of these "divine vapours" at Delphi unambiguously. The haze from the rock is rather taken as a metaphor for otherworldly revelations. At least, such is the pragmatic reading of the legend. All the more so since the