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…yesterday I met an acquaintance, a peasant woman, to whom I could not help remarking that she had changed… And she said to me: you too, my dear provider, have grown old, and plain besides. Though I might say, together with my late nanny: handsome I never was, but young
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On 9 June 1994 the British channel ITV broadcast a documentary by the journalist Jonathan Dimbleby in which Prince Charles, now King Charles III, admitted to adultery. By then Charles and Diana had already been living apart for a year and a half. That same evening Princess Diana arrived at
Faith · Books · People
No matter what was around them. And no matter what the blizzard was drawlingly howling about; That they were cramped in the shepherd's lodging, That there was no other place for them in the world. Firstly, they were together. The second thing, and the main one, was that
Books · People · Ethnography
Whereas the cleverer we become, the less we understand the meaning of life and the more we see some wicked mockery in the fact that we suffer and die, these people live, suffer and draw near to death with calm, and more often than not with joy. Whereas a calm
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During one of their joint journeys, in September and October 1903, Dmitry Stelletsky photographed Boris Kustodiev on the bridge over the River Volkhov, with the Novgorod Kremlin and the Sophia Bell Tower behind him. The photograph, together with other pictures from their expeditions, was donated by Kustodiev's heirs
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In 1900 Stelletsky and Kustodiev made an expedition through the Kostroma Governorate, and in 1903 through the Russian North and the Novgorod Governorate. They travelled to ancient Russian towns and monasteries, sometimes together, sometimes separately, sketching monastic frescoes and icons and noting down their impressions. Kustodiev, as you can see,
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Igor Grabar, speaking on behalf of the artists attending the congress as guests, announced that the artists intended to present the congress with a portrait of Stalin. Boris Pasternak, a member of the congress presidium, who was sitting on the stage, took it upon himself to steady the portrait of
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Photo by Yury Rybchinsky Anastasia, the younger sister of Marina Tsvetaeva, also travelled a far from easy road. Her first husband, the chemical engineer Mauritius Mints, died of peritonitis only two years after the wedding, in the Crimea, at the house of Maximilian Voloshin, where they had gone after the
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On 31 August 1941, in evacuation at Yelabuga, Marina Tsvetaeva took her own life. That day her son Mur and the mistress of the house were sent off to clear a site for an airfield; she was left alone and hanged herself in the entrance passage. In the kitchen a
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Photo by Georgy Rozov
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Explicable, it seems, by his part in organising the pay of the Bolsheviks from 1902
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Japanese Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka stands accused of image manipulation in ten papers over the past twenty years. Yamanaka received the Nobel Prize in 2012 for reprogramming mature cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, and heads the corresponding centre at Kyoto University, CiRA. We shall not go into the research