People - The Parnassian (Page 8)

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The sisters Lilya Brik and Elsa Triolet show off dresses by Nadezhda Lamanova before the lens of the photographer Germaine Krull during a shoot in Berlin in 1925 for the newspaper Excelsior-Dimanche

Lilya Brik and Elsa Triolet were not mannequins. One was Mayakovsky's beloved and the chief muse of the Russian avant-garde; the other would, within a few years, become a French writer and the wife of Louis Aragon. But in the mid-1920s both performed one curious mission:

Faith · Books · Mores · People

On 3 June 1929 the philosopher Alexei Losev and his wife Valentina were secretly tonsured as monastics by the Athonite elder Archimandrite David, taking the names Andronik and Athanasia

It was a monastic tonsure "in the world", that is, without withdrawal to a monastery. The person goes on living an ordinary life, but takes monastic vows. For decades neither students nor colleagues, for the most part, suspected anything; the secret was confided only to a chosen few

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Mel Gibson at the Hilandar Monastery in 2025

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Rehabilitation of Metropolitan Joseph (Chernov) of Alma-Ata and Kazakhstan (1893-1975), accused after the war of collaborating with the occupiers, has recently been revoked

Metropolitan Joseph was a man whom many tipped as Patriarch of All Russia after the death of Alexy I. He is also the author of the legendary retort to the remark that Yuri Gagarin had flown into space and not seen God, which ran as follows: Yuri Gagarin did not

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Grace from On High

The inscription on the coronation token of Elizabeth Petrovna, 1742 And the reign of Peter's daughter truly was a gracious one

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Can you believe this photograph dates from 1910?

It was taken by Pyotr Ivanovich Vedenisov in Yalta in the 1910s, using the technology of the Lumière brothers. Pyotr Vedenisov graduated from the Moscow Conservatoire in 1888, moved to Yalta and spent the rest of his life there as a pianist, local historian, meteorologist and amateur photographer with a

Architecture · Moscow · Education · People

Among the Moscow state gymnasia, the Fourth stood in a class of its own

Among the Moscow state gymnasia, the Fourth stood in a class of its own. It was a classical school of the highest rank, with Latin and Greek, and with the right of direct entry to Moscow University. Its teachers were men of uncommon gifts: the physicist Kraevich, whose textbook outlived

Art · People · Pop Culture · Saint Petersburg

A new record for Timur Novikov at the Vladey auction: the contrast-fabric work "Rocket Attack" of 1986 sold for 243,000 euros

The work dates from the period when Novikov collaborated closely with Kino, designing the group's concerts and living in the same artistic space where Tsoi, Guryanov, Kuryokhin and Pop-Mekhanika formed a single, indivisible world. The "New Artists" did not then separate painting, music and performance;

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He was physically abused, maybe even sexually abused

A Cambridge lecturer on the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. As the saying goes, this is as far as your education has taken you Fortunately, in this case the British scholar is not, after all, a professional historian, nor indeed a scholar at all, but merely gives lectures in adult

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Elizabeth II Would Have Turned One Hundred This Year

Photograph by Cecil Beaton, 1955

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Sergey Kuznetsov Steps Down as Moscow's Chief Architect, a Post He Has Held Since 2012

Sergey Kuznetsov has left his post as Moscow's chief architect, which he had held since 2012. After almost 14 years in the position, he intends to turn to projects of his own

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