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Art · Books · Museums
Diomedes Wounds Aphrodite in the “Iliad” and Ingres’s Sketch in a Basel Museum
Дочь Зевсова! брось ты войну и кровавую битву; Не довольно ли, если прельщаешь ты слабых супругов? Страшно, ах, страшно опять возвращаться тебе на сраженья. Или, быть может, захочешь еще — и содрогнешься при мысли: Всякий раз, как пойдешь, увидишь то место, где рана Тяжкая в длань проницала тебе от руки Диомеда!
The East · Cinema · Books · Observations · People
Julio Peña as Cervantes in Amenábar's film about his captivity by Algerian pirates
Among my plans for the near future: seeing Alejandro Amenábar's new film about my beloved Cervantes. Julio Peña plays Miguel de Cervantes. The action unfolds in 1575, and the narrative draws on the real biography of the author of Don Quixote. As attentive readers will remember, many years
Archive · Books · Observations · Science · Paris
In an eighteenth-century alchemical manuscript, "The Wisdom of the Ancient Philosophers, or Their Teaching on the Supreme and Universal Medicine", once kept in the Capuchin library on the Rue Saint-Honoré and describing a universal medicine capable of pre
Let us take four from the many scenes: Fermentatio, Putrefactio, Solutio, Calcinatio. They show, first, the substance: a toad half-submerged in water and speckled with rising bubbles. This is the textbook visual representation of the "putrefaction of matter, often accompanied by the release of gas. Putrefaction is followed
Books · People
And with every year I live more stubbornly, more fiercely
Anna Akhmatova on old age
Faith · Books · Science
Virgil's line that all is full of Jupiter and its meaning in alchemy
Tell me, Damoetas, whose flock is this? Is it Meliboeus'? "You are mistaken, Aegon: it is another's. But let it be, for often Thyrsis himself called out to me, and Aegon answered." <a lengthy, bantering conversation of the shepherds> With Jove, Muses, let
Aristocracy · Cinema · Books
Luchino Visconti's film about Prince Salina and the civil war in Italy
Remembering the magnificent 1963 screen adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel "The Leopard", on the life of the aristocratic Salina family amid the political and social upheavals of the Risorgimento in Italy. Civil war is breaking out in Italy. On one side stand the republicans,
Books · Monarchies · Rome · Humour
Livia Drusilla's speech to rebels at the imperial palace in Robert Graves's version
What do you want? A republic? The republic was a fraud. Do you want civil wars again? Do you want famine in the streets once more? Do you want the barbarians to come knocking at your doors? You bawl yourselves hoarse in vain. Go home! Rabble! And you call yourselves
Books · Society · Humour
Nikolay Agnivtsev in 1925 on a primus stove that envied the Ford, and Kalinin's reply
The Primus stove is very Troubled, Ailing with something, Dissatisfied, Though he – a Primus – is first-rate. – Ah, in my grief I'll fling myself into the stove, Dash, Fling, Topple over… Why am I only a Primus, And not a "Ford". Literal translation In the end
Cinema · Books · Pop Culture · Humour
The most interesting historical angle is a view of the universe in which Bulgakov's (let us not forget this, for all the charm of Leonid Gaidai) inventor-engineer Timofeev, and Nikolai Ivanovich rather than Alexander…
The most interesting historical angle is a view of the universe in which Bulgakov's (let us not forget this, for all the charm of Leonid Gaidai) inventor-engineer Timofeev, and Nikolai Ivanovich rather than Alexander Sergeyevich, upon inventing the time machine, meets the Briton Doctor Who. Naturally, it
Faith · The East · Books · Observations · Science · People · Humour
René Guénon on buddhi as the perception of the transcendent and his life in Cairo
René Guénon writes that "intellect" once meant the perception of transcendent realities, and introduces the Sanskrit term buddhi, all but forgotten in the West. He explains that buddhi is the faculty of glimpsing another world, whose traces appear in the soul as intellectual intuitions. Apparently, the term is
Books · Observations · Mores · People
Let us return briefly to the theme of Marina Tsvetaeva and the pink dress, which appears in her poems for good reason
Let us return briefly to the theme of Marina Tsvetaeva and the pink dress, which appears in her poems for good reason. The dress also caught the attention of Ekaterina Gorpinko, who examined the history of Tsvetaeva's "pink dress" in greater detail for her book "