Archive · Monarchies · Society · Saint Petersburg
On this day 120 years ago, 17 (30) October 1905, Emperor Nicholas II issued the Supreme Manifesto granting legislative power to the State Duma and establishing the political rights and freedoms of citizens. It proclaimed, in particular: To grant the population the unshakeable foundations of civil liberty, based on the
Coming Up · Art · Museums · Observations · Saint Petersburg
At times it seems to me that museums of classical art are temples not so much of beauty as of discipline, intellectual discipline included, naturally. We often go there not for inspiration but for confirmation that our world can still be explained, at least a little. And yet, after dozens
Faith · Art · Books · Museums · Saint Petersburg
In the hour of mournful midnight the beating of the heart grows more distinct, and nearer comes the bright-winged companion, my grieved and gentle friend. He draws near, but soon I lose myself, and in my sleep I see a storm, I see the sea And maidens laughing on
Art · Museums · Science · Saint Petersburg
There are three versions of the painting "The Lute Player". One is kept in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. The second belongs to the collection of the Wildenstein family, the well-known French art dealers. The third was until recently considered a copy. In 1969 specialists from Sotheby&
Aristocracy · Archive · Monarchies · Mores · Saint Petersburg
Interior of the study of Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukaya, the first Most Serene Princess Yuryevskaya, in her house on the English Embankment in Saint Petersburg. Photograph of 1876. Princess Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukova (Dolgorukaya), from 1880 Most Serene Princess Yuryevskaya (1847 to 1922), was the second, morganatic, wife of Emperor Alexander II;
Archive · Books · Society · Saint Petersburg
Illustrations to the rare émigré publication “There! Pictures of the Soviet Paradise” of the early 1920s. The new life in Bolshevik Petrograd is depicted by the authors with scrawny cows in city courtyards, starving people in a canteen, unbuttoned sailors and their drunken girlfriends from the Cheka, and workers sleeping
The East · Museums · Society · Saint Petersburg
Mikhail Piotrovsky announces the opening of new Hermitage centres abroad, in Oman and South Korea. The centres in Korea and Oman are the first overseas satellites of the Hermitage to be announced since 2022.
Books · Mores · Saint Petersburg · Society Pages
While Moscow plunges into the raging art scene, Saint Petersburg calmly opens the autumn social season. And in the history of Petersburg, as you know, the society dinner was always more than a mere taking of nourishment: it was a form of conversation, a platform for ideas and a place
Coming Up · Art · Saint Petersburg
A week ago I wrote about the then forthcoming exhibition of collector Zoya Galeeva's collection at the Anna Nova gallery in Saint Petersburg. Today I offer a friendly reminder that the exhibition is open and ready to receive guests and residents of the cultural capital. Zoya Galeeva has
Archive · Books · Museums · Society · People · Saint Petersburg
The Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House holds collections of verse with pasted-over pages. It is reported that Akhmatova herself pasted these pages shut. What is beneath? Akhmatova's poems about Stalin. It is believed that Anna Andreyevna was compelled to write them in order to help her
Coming Up · Art · Saint Petersburg
On 31 August the Anna Nova gallery in Saint Petersburg will open "Trauma and Rebirth", a large-scale exhibition from the contemporary art collection of the patron Zoya Galeyeva. The concept of the exhibition rests on the psychoanalytic theory of Carl Gustav Jung and his notion of the
Art · Museums · Saint Petersburg
Another Hermitage Giorgione, likewise acquired in 1772 from the collection of Baron Crozat de Thiers in Paris: a widely known male portrait, regarded until the mid-nineteenth century as a work by Giorgione but subsequently reattributed more than once. The picture has been ascribed to Domenico Mancini and to Domenico