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

Faith · Art · Books

The structure of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in Dante and the placement of souls by circle

Some Sample Schemes of the Layout of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise according to the Text of Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" Hell: 9 circles. Purgatory: 6 circles and 3 circles of Ante-Purgatory. Paradise: 9 levels. In Hell there is pitch darkness, in Limbo, half-light. In

Archive · Faith · Geography · Maps · Books

Excerpt from Yelena Shvarts's poem about the nun Lavinia and the abbess's lessons

The Abbess set me a task – To make her map of Paradise more precise. I told her – I am no Swedenborg. She said to me: be humbler and more meek. All night I toiled in vain and wilted, Until my Angel-Wolf flew in, He took pencils, paper, compasses And

Books · People

Nikolai Berdyaev on his rejection of family ties and kinship in the book “Self-Knowledge”

"I have never had any feeling of descent from a father and mother, I have never felt that I was born of parents. A dislike of everything ancestral is a characteristic trait of mine. I do not love the family and family life, and I am struck by the

Interviews · Books · Museums · Reportage

The 8th “Tolstoy” Theatre Festival at Yasnaya Polyana featured more than 100 events

This weekend the Yasnaya Polyana estate-museum hosted a major cultural event: the eighth "Tolstoy" theatre festival. More than a hundred events took place at 13 open-air venues: plays, concerts, film screenings, lectures, promenade performances and workshops. Now that the sounds of theatre, classical music and cinema

Books · Observations · Society

Never has our future been so unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest…

Hannah Arendt

Books · People · Humour

Brodsky on addiction to scrolling reels and TikToks, in his Nobel lecture:

One who writes a poem writes it above all because verse is a colossal accelerator of consciousness, of thinking, of one's sense of the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, a person is no longer capable of abandoning the chance of repeating this experience; he falls into dependence

Old engraving of two men operating on the head of a patient seated in a chair, with a sick person lying in bed in the room behind.

Books · Observations · Science · Humour

Trepanation in the practice of the 16th-century Spanish physician Franciscus Arceus

Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful medicine of the past. What bliss to live in the twentieth century. And, in part, the twenty-first. Trepanation by the sixteenth-century Spanish physician Francisco Arceo

Cinema · Books · Pop Culture

NBC's 1980s miniseries based on Ray Bradbury's “The Martian Chronicles”

In the 1980s NBC screened a miniseries based on Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles", about the settlement of Mars by Earthlings who have left their home planet because of nuclear war. Having made a technological leap after the Second World War, humanity ends by destroying life

A page of an old printed book with a passage on inner anxieties, conscience and the passions.

Faith · Books · People

An old printed text on inner anxieties as the result of a guilty conscience

Archbishop Platon, court preacher to Catherine II, on the nature of anxiety:. Inward disquiet proceeds from a reproachful conscience, which feels shame and remorse when the passions are followed against the dominion of the mind. Such a wretched state of the soul is not from God, but from a depraved

Page of an old Russian book in eighteenth-century civil type with a printed answer about the Lacedaemonians and drunkenness.

Books · Mores · Education · Humour

How the Lacedaemonians showed children a drunken serf to instil disgust for drunkenness

Advice on How to Keep the Young from the Temptation of Drunkenness, from an Encyclopaedia of 1597. The Lacedaemonians, that is, the Spartans, would parade a drunken serf before their children, so as to instil in them an utter loathing of drunkenness as the vilest of all passions

Archive · Books · Observations

Now you know that Jane Austen wrote cross-hatched letters

Any thoughts as to why? This kind of letter was widespread in the early days of the postal service: crossed writing was used to reduce the number of sheets and to lighten the envelopes

Books · Humour

Vera Inber’s poem “Sdayetsya kvartira” about a snail and the would-be tenants of her flat

Once a Snail put out An advert: "To let: flat with a gate Of its own. Peace, quiet. Kitchen garden And garage. Water. Lighting. Ground floor." Scarcely had the notice Appeared in the wood When at once there began A stir all around. Many answered. From his lookout