Archaeology · Observations · Science
It seems that, for the tenth time this month, I shall have to propose rewriting the textbooks on prehistory. This time the culprit is a high-profile study by an international team of scientists, which pushes back the timeline of the mastery of fire by hundreds of thousands of years!
Architecture · Moscow · Observations · Heritage · Society
Well, Muscovites will long remember the architect Kuznetsov and other officials of the city administration with kind words, as they look at the gaps in the historic fabric of the centre, filled with highly valuable items of elite real estate. Take, for instance, the site of the former Baldina apartment
Archaeology · Faith · Observations · Society · Ethnography
In Lima, ahead of the presidential run-off, shamans gathered on Herradura beach and blessed portraits of both candidates, Fujimori and López Aliaga. The rite is repeated there every year and before every vote, and it is no exotica staged for the amusement of tourists but a living example of
Books · Observations · Society
Ivan the Terrible and Kurbsky exchanged "letters" that were not a correspondence but a literary duel, staged for the public and meant for the judgement of posterity. Both understood that they would be read far beyond the Lithuanian border. The open letter is a genre with a catch.
Art · Cinema · Moscow · Observations · People
The posthumous fate of an artist is rarely decided by the artist himself. It is decided by those who remain: an heir, a pupil, a gallerist, an executor, the sort of person who will gather the scattered works, arrange them by year and spend decades patiently reminding the world of
Art · Museums · Observations · Paris
Five years ago I watched this seventeenth-century "Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the Infant John the Baptist", attributed to the French painter Jacques Stella, go under the hammer and fail to sell at an estimate of 60,000 to 90,000 euros. Today I see the
Faith · Interviews · Observations · Society · Pop Culture · Humour
Well, that's a turn-up! Candace Owens in the studio of "Parsuna" with Vladimir Legoyda. The mission "from Twitter to the Paterikon" has officially begun. Congratulations to the team, and to Vladimir Romanovich personally! We await the broadcast, we are preparing our dogmatic remarks,
Archaeology · Art · Books · Monarchies · Museums · Observations · Heritage · Science · Society
“What is our life? A tale we shall not recall twice, once it has been told,” runs the thought from Byron’s “Don Juan”, and so at the end of every month we reassemble the key publications that can be reread and kept in memory. Archaeology and the origins of
Faith · Observations · Mores · Society
Catholic Salesian nuns from San Antonio, long-standing fans of the Spurs basketball club, blessed their favourite player Luke Cornet before the game against the Oklahoma City Thunder. It is curious that the Oklahoma City Thunder, for their part, have been holding a public prayer of invocation before every home
Art · Observations · New York · Pop Culture · Humour
Brooklyn artist Jeremy Olson has dressed the windows of the Hermès flagship on Madison Avenue in New York as a surrealist installation: a body sinking into a sofa, surrounded by biomorphic furniture and lamps. Hermès wanted to play on its signature motifs and the equestrian theme, hence the appearance of
Faith · Books · Observations · Science
IMLI RAN has published a two-volume study, "F.M. Dostoevsky's Novel Crime and Punishment: The Current State of Scholarship", edited by T.A. Kasatkina. It is the fourth book in the "current state of scholarship" project on Dostoevsky: before it came The Idiot
The East · Monarchies · Observations · Heritage · Society · Humour
The Fund for the Royal Private Collections commissioned an appraisal of roughly a thousand objects. Under suspicion are a golden amulet necklace and historical weapons from Indonesia, acquired in the colonial era. I can just picture how the Dutch East India Company would have laughed at so modest a discovery.