Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Sergei M. Soloviev, the great Russian historian, visited Brussels in 1842 (possibly 1843) as a young graduate of the Moscow University. He wrote of Belgium with great warmth: … and the cities – with their heroic medieval history, their blooming…
Gary Saul Morson has a wonderful article in The Weekly Standard: …Russian “populism” (narodnichestvo, from narod, the people) began in the 1870s… The importance of Russian populism lies less in its programs than in its ethos, a guilty idealism… Jolting…
A Daughter of Albion is a short story by Anton Chekhov. It was first published in 1883 in Nikolai Leykin’s magazine, Fragments (or Shards, perhaps more precisely). Up until 1888 Chekhov was known to the Russian public primarily as the…
Reuters reported from Moscow on Thursday: Russian police briefly detained veteran British campaigner Peter Tatchell in Moscow on Thursday after he attempted to hold a one-man protest near the Kremlin in support of gay rights on the first day of…
There’s a Soviet joke – probably of Russo-Jewish origin like many Soviet jokes – that goes this way, approximately (the original Russian is grammatically imperfect): Let go of Daddy’s foot, kids, and stop swinging! He didn’t hang himself for this,…
Bob Seely, the conservative MP for the Isle of White, made these claims during a hearing on May 1: …Christopher Chandler is a public figure, owing to the Legatum Institute… According to the French security services… Mr Chandler is described…
Why would Bashar Assad order the chemical attack in eastern Ghouta? I’ve come across a helpful counterquestion asked by someone in the Russian-speaking parts of the web: And why did Mikhail Tukhachevsky use poison gas against the Tambov insurgents in…
And now for a lighter note. While Googling “John Bayley” & “Wuthering Heights” yesterday, I stumbled on this: The greats we hateSpectator writers and others on the classic books they most dislike Christopher Howse, The Spectator‘s religion columnist, confesses: I…
Johnny Cash sang this at Folsom Prison 50 years ago: Yes, they’re hanging Joe Bean this morningfor a shooting that he never did.He killed twenty men by the time he was ten –he was an unruly kid. It might be…
One of the memorable works at last year’s Someone 1917 exhibition in Moscow was this 1917 painting (alternative links: 1, 2) by Vladimir A. Kuznetsov (1877-1960). Its title can be translated as God’s People or Godly Folk. These are Old Believers praying…
Some three weeks ago, Himadri (the Argumentative Old Git) wrote about the change in his perception of Bruckner’s symphonies, which he used to love as a young man: But it struck me recently that it has been a long time…
Two extracts from 20th-century Russian classics in lieu of commentary to Thursday’s State of the Federation address. “What the hell are you trying to get out of me?” “The same thing that my childhood friend, Kolya Osten-Baken, wanted to get…