NB! · Faith · Art · Moscow · Observations · Rome
Jules Eugène Lenepveu, Saints in the Catacombs (of Rome). One more thing I love about Moscow is that there are no mass burials beneath it, as there are under so many European capitals. Only rivers. Somehow life is calmer with that thought
Monarchies · Moscow · Museums · Observations
This, by the way, is no legend: the saddle really was presented to Sheremetev by Peter I. I saw it with my own eyes at the 2009 exhibition in the Kremlin, marking the 300th anniversary of the Great Northern War and the Battle of Poltava. I remember it as if
NB! · Art · Moscow · Museums · Observations · Humour
They say that when Chagall was in Moscow, he was so struck by the beauty of Levitan's canvases that he asked the Tretyakov Gallery to give him one landscape in exchange for all his own paintings. Fools, they should have agreed!
NB! · Archive · Art · Moscow · Museums · Heritage
The Tretyakov Gallery has preserved a Chagall autograph. In the photograph he is seen with Furtseva and, in all likelihood, her daughter Svetlana Petrovna
Art · Moscow · Museums · People
In 1973, the 86-year-old Marc Chagall visited the Soviet Union for the first time. The visit was arranged by the Minister of Culture, Yekaterina Furtseva, who had been introduced to the artist in Paris. At the Tretyakov Gallery there opened what contemporaries described as a modest exhibition of
NB! · Art · Moscow · Observations · Humour
The Moscow flood brings to mind a 1643 woodcut of an epic witch seen floating on a plank down the River Kennet at Newbury in England. With the weather we are having, an excellent means of getting about
NB! · Monarchies · Moscow · Heritage · Nature
NB! · Archive · Moscow · Nature
There is a legend that the hurricane of 1904 carried a horse and cart across to the other bank of the Moskva River. At any rate, it lifted houses into the air, wooden and brick alike
NB! · Archive · Moscow · Nature
Archive · Geography · Moscow · Nature
On 16 June 1904 a tornado struck Moscow; the force of the wind that day is estimated at 25 m/s, that is 9 on the 12-point Beaufort scale (or a storm). More than 100 people were killed that day and more than 800 were injured. Gilyarovsky described the
Books · Moscow · Observations · Society
There is a well-known passage from a Lotman lecture on the psychological and social causes of boorishness, which applies equally to the modern hooligan and, as it turns out, to many a civil servant. A simple formula explains the defiant, odious conduct of people who knowingly destroy what is
NB! · Archive · Architecture · Monarchies · Moscow · Heritage
The monument to Alexander III on the Prechistenskaya Embankment took 12 years to build, and 2.5 million roubles were raised for it by subscription. It was pulled down six years after its unveiling, in the summer of 1918