Many skiers on a broad snowy hillside with a grove at the top, and people with sledges in the foreground.

Art · Observations · Mores · Humour

A GDR furniture set and a 1970s photograph of skiers on a snowy slope

Anyone Who Owned a Czechoslovak Suite of Furniture Should Also Enjoy a Czechoslovak Bruegel. Admittedly, ours was from the GDR, but I am very fond of this photograph from the 1970s

NB! · Aristocracy · Art · Mores · Humour

The Boudoir of the Marquise de Pompadour's Dog Has Seen a Great Deal in Its Time

Observations · Mores · Society · Humour

The typical Soviet club as the cultural centre of a settlement or district

The typical club of our day is where everyone has a “unique style” but the same trainers and the same playlist, and even the bouncer knows you came not for fun but for a top-up of self-esteem. The typical club of the era of the developed welfare state,

Observations · Heritage · Mores · Rome

Police seal the Antico Caffe Greco in Rome, a café founded in 1760

The oldest café in Rome has closed. The owners of the building have evicted the cosy Antico Caffè Greco, near the Spanish Steps, where Stendhal, Casanova, Andersen and Schopenhauer once sat, and where, among our own compatriots, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, for one, left his mark. The long stand-off between

Art · Museums · Observations · Mores · Paris

Paul Poiret's wire turban and the turn-of-the-century fashion for fearing electricity

Incredible, but this feathered ornament by Paul Poiret is in fact made of the finest metal wire. The curator of the Poiret retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs said that for the whole team this extraordinary headdress came as a discovery. But I recalled the amusing fashion of the

NB! · Mores · Pop Culture · Humour

The state after any party when you are 30 and not 20

NB! · Mores · Ethnography

Ruthless Folk Fashion

Faith · Mores

Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov on why God asks people only to fulfil their ordinary duties

The Lord does not require you to stop eating, drinking and sleeping, or to give all your property to the poor. Do what you ought: if you are a wife, be a normal wife; if you are a father, be a normal father; if you are a son, be a

NB! · Architecture · Mores · Society · Humour

Treatment by Palace: The Chief Achievement of Soviet Medicine

Archive · Mores · People

Voloshin's house in Koktebel and Marina Tsvetaeva's meeting with Sergei Efron in 1911

Photographs taken at Maximilian Voloshin's dacha in Koktebel, Crimea, in 1911. Voloshin began living in Koktebel in 1907: his mother, Elena Ottobaldovna Kirienko-Voloshina, whom the poet and his friends called "Pra", from the word for "foremother", bought a plot of land here and

NB! · Observations · Mores · Humour

One should not, of course, compare the ballrooms of 1725 and 1925 with those of 2025; it will be better for everyone

Aristocracy · Archive · Monarchies · Mores · Saint Petersburg

Ekaterina Dolgorukaya's study on the English Embankment in Saint Petersburg, 1876

Interior of the study of Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukaya, the first Most Serene Princess Yuryevskaya, in her house on the English Embankment in Saint Petersburg. Photograph of 1876. Princess Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukova (Dolgorukaya), from 1880 Most Serene Princess Yuryevskaya (1847 to 1922), was the second, morganatic, wife of Emperor Alexander II;