Category: russia
Russian Modernism and Byzantine Iconography – another false dichotomy
A recurrent pattern in the history of ideas is a dominant narrative creating dichotomies that, at the time, did not exist. I have blogged about these before – false tension…
Beshoff’s Chip Shop Founder was Last Survivor of Potemkin Mutiny
From his 1987 New York Times obituary: Ivan Beshoff, the last survivor of the 1905 mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin, a harbinger of the Russian Revolution, died Sunday, his…
The sound of night – from R Murray Schafer’s “Soundscapes”
“In the special darkness of the northern winter, where life was centered in small pools of candlelight, beyond which shadows draped and flickered mysteriously, the mind explored the dark side…
I Taught Myself To Live Simply – Anna Akhmatova
I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God, and to wander long before evening to tire my superfluous worries. When the…
Daniel Kalder on Cold War Armageddon
Children of the 1980s recall the pervasive atmosphere of imminent nuclear devastation which we somehow survived. Not unlike Daniel Kalder with the naval base warning siren, I found that the…
Yet you came, and were not turned away: Epiphany / Theophany
It is Epiphany, or Theophany in Eastern Christendom. Water features strongly in this liturgy; it is the occasion of the Great Blessing Of The Waters. This video, seven years old,…
“an author whose books were marvellous but rather the same” – Elizabeth Taylor and Andrei Makine
I have just begun reading Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippincote’s (not, it feels obligatory to point out, not that Elizabeth Taylor. From Valerie Martin‘s introduction: Though I never met either…
Séamus Sweeney 