Art · Monarchies · People

Table medal commemorating the death of Emperor Alexander I the Blessed, who reposed in God on 19 November 1825

The reverse bears the inscription: Our Angel in Heaven 1812. On the obverse, around the bust of the Emperor in a laurel wreath, a serpent bites its own tail.

Moscow · Museums · Observations · People

If, like me, you spent years riding the “Bukashka” along the Garden Ring and, hearing the announcement of the stop “Chekhov House-Museum”, thought: “The Chekhov museum, I really must go in”, then right now, for example, there is a curious exhibition there

Thanks to the exhibition, which has the witty title “I Have No Better Photograph”, I learned that Anton Pavlovich was very fond of being photographed. True, he was not particularly inclined to change his pose. There are dozens of pictures taken many years apart in which he sits literally in

Archive · Books · Mores · People

Tolkien's love for Edith from 1906 and the story of Beren and Luthien in “The Silmarillion”

In 1972, shortly after his wife's death, Tolkien wrote that he had never called her Lúthien, but that she was the source of the story at the heart of The Silmarillion. Ronald met Edith in 1906 and fell in love, but the orphaned Tolkien's guardian opposed

Books · Science · Society · People

Arnold Toynbee spent more than 25 years writing "A Study of History"

Arnold Toynbee spent more than 25 years writing "A Study of History". The work, which describes the rise and fall of civilisations, gave us the remark that civilisations die from suicide, not murder. Toynbee maintains that the fate of civilisations is determined by their response to the challenges

Art · Monarchies · Mores · Paris · People · Humour

The Marquise de Montespan as Judith, Thriftily Holding On to the Severed Head of Holofernes

Once more, for the record: the Marquise de Montespan, mistress of Louis XIV and mother of seven of his children, in the guise of the Old Testament heroine Judith, the young widow who saved besieged Judea by cutting off the head of Nebuchadnezzar's general Holofernes, whom she had

Art · Moscow · People · Society Pages

Valery Alexandrovich Dudakov, one of the oldest and most authoritative collectors in Russia, who stood at the origins of the Collectors' Club of the Soviet Culture Foundation, created in 1987 on the basis of the country's largest private collections, show

Dudakov is showing paintings by precisely those artists with whom his collection began in 1970: Vladimir Nemukhin, Nikolai Vechtomov, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Oskar Rabin, Boris Sveshnikov, Vladimir Weisberg, Mikhail Shvartsman, Yuli Sooster. Valery Alexandrovich knew the generation of the nonconformist "men of the sixties" personally and was friends with

NB! · Books · Science · People

AST-Nonfiction Signs Contract with Heirs of Manhattan Project Director Robert Oppenheimer to Publish His Works in Russia

NB! · Observations · People · Humour

Leonardo da Vinci disapproves of our forgetting to congratulate him yesterday on his 572nd birthday

Archive · Art · Moscow · Museums · People

Exhibition “Always Zoya. An Exhibition Novel” on Zoya Boguslavskaya at the Voznesensky Center

The exhibition "Always Zoya. An Exhibition Novel" at the Voznesensky Centre is remarkably cohesive, although it embraces so many different incarnations of Zoya Borisovna: science, journalism, literature, civic engagement, art, all the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, the stories of the great figures who became part of her

NB! · Moscow · Museums · People · Society Pages

Zoya Boguslavskaya on the eve of her hundredth birthday with her son Leonid Boguslavsky at the opening of the exhibition "Always Zoya. An Exhibition Novel" at the Voznesensky Centre

Zoya Boguslavskaya on the eve of her hundredth birthday with her son Leonid Boguslavsky at the opening of the exhibition "Always Zoya. An Exhibition Novel" at the Voznesensky Centre, devoted to the creative and personal path of Zoya Borisovna

Landscape with a brick house on a canal bank, a boat, a cart and water lilies, the house reflected in blue water.

NB! · Art · People

Early realist paintings by Piet Mondrian, later a pioneer of abstraction

Both paintings are by Piet Mondrian. Yes, the pioneer of abstraction began as a realist painter

Art · Moscow · Museums · People

Retrospective for the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Veysberg at the Pushkin Museum

The Pushkin Museum's Gallery of European and American Art hosts "From Colour to Light", an exhibition marking the centenary of Vladimir Veisberg, a landmark figure of Soviet unofficial art. It offers a unique chance to see a retrospective of the creator of the "white on