2013-08-17 G.Revzin. Problems with reconstruction of Pushkin Museum kommersant.ru
2013-08-15 Jack Hanick in Russia foma.ru
2013-08-14 Mindadze's film "Dear Hans, Dear Peter" does not get state financing lenta.ru
2013-08-14 P.Kosovo. Real colonel Kurtz rusplt.ru
2013-08-09 Novel by Goebbels published in Russia trud.ru
2013-08-07 RAS will get its self-control back ria.ru
2013-08-02 A.Chernyh, G.Tumanov, D.Butrin. Russian Government palns the reform of physical institutes kommersant.ru
2013-08-01 A.Gorbachev. Makarevich and Oximiron on copyright laws afisha.ru
2013-07-29 Iksanov's era ends in GABT lenta.ru
2013-07-29 K.Severinov: RAS is not convenient for doing science polit.ru
2013-07-28 P.Arseev. Reform of RAS is a national disaster sovsekretno.ru
2013-07-25 VIR collection is under the threat of destruction argumenti.ru
2013-07-16 M.Piotrovsky about Hermitage kommersant.ru
2013-07-15 V.Toporov. Paralympian Bykov izvestia.ru
2013-07-13 Mikhalkov on the Russian serfdom censor.net.ua
2013-07-10 N.Belyushina. Mikhalkov's snake snob.ru
2013-07-09 Director of GABT A.Iksanov resigns lenta.ru
2013-07-08 Gosduma votes fro liquidation of RAS branches in Siberia, Urlas and Far East vedomosti.ru
2013-07-03 A.Kolesnikov. Putin and Fortov meet on the RAS reform kommersant.ru
A.Voronov. Putin Does not stop the reform of RAS, suggests Fortov to lead both RAS and new Agency
2013-07-01 A.Privalov. This reform is about liquidation of RAS expert.ru
2013-07-01 Russian Ministry of Culture and Russian State Library sue Library of Congress on the books from Schneerson Library collection lenta.ru
2013-07-01 T.Yershova. Tsiskaridze leaves GABT lenta.ru
2013-06-28 Cost of the Russian Academy of Sciences reform: 500M roubles lenta.ru
2013-06-28 S.Komkov on the destruction of Russian Academy of Sciences expert.ru
2013-06-23 M.Trofimenkov. Terrorist with the camera. Radical directors in Moscow kommersant.ru
2013-06-20 Gelman's office in Perm searched dp.ru
2013-06-19 Gelman fired from the Perm Museum of Modern Art lenta.ru
2013-06-19 K.Dolinina. Conflict in The Russian Institute of the History of Arts kommersant.ru
2013-06-14 O.Popova. Wagner's Ring in Mariinskiy Theater age.lenta.ru
2013-06-08 GABT fires Tsiskaridze lenta.ru
2013-05-28 In 2012, VAK awarded more than 1.3K fake doctor degrees gazeta.ru
2013-05-26 The case of poisoning Bagdasarovs' tigers is closed lenta.ru
2013-05-20 Bykov: Skobeyda has no place in Russian journalism profile.ru
2013-05-06 Yu.Bederova. The opening of Mariinka-2 lenta.ru
2013-04-17 Lev Pirogov. On Shukshin and great Russian writers rusplatforma.org
2013-04-12 Director of Navy Museum in SPB arrested for fraud lenta.ru
2013-04-05 A.Popova. Academician Alferov confronts Minister Livanov lenta.ru
2013-03-30 Taganka Theater will not have a director until 2014 lenta.ru
2013-03-28 A.Popova. Historical textbook by V.Gulyaeva found to be plagiarized lenta.ru
2013-03-21 Former GUU rector provides evidence against Deputy Minister of Education lenta.ru
2013-03- 09 Rector of Control University GUU arrested on corruption charges
2013-03-19 A.Kholina. Scandals in GABT izvestia.ru
2013-03-17 Dmitrichenko elected GABT Union Chairman lenta.ru
2013-03-12 GABT artists defend Dmitrichenko lenta.ru
2013-03-05 Anna Karenina by Solovyev corpuscula.blogspot.ru
2013-03-05 ELLEN BARRY. Russia Detains Dancer in Bolshoi Acid Attack nytimes.com
Police officials in Moscow on Tuesday detained a dancer at the Bolshoi Ballet and two suspected accomplices in connection with an acid attack in January on the company’s artistic director, Sergei Filin, a crime that gripped Moscow and left one of Russia’s most revered institutions in turmoil.
Investigators said they believed the dancer, Pavel Dmitrichenko, hired two men to accost Mr. Filin outside his apartment building late on Jan. 17. As Mr. Filin punched in an entry code, the police said, a masked man called his name and tossed the contents of a jar of sulfuric acid at his eyes.
Shortly after midnight, a spokesman for the Russian Interior Ministry said that one of the three had confessed to the crime. “Therefore, we can consider that the crime has been solved,” the spokesman said, according to the Interfax news agency. The person who the police say confessed was not identified.
The crime set off weeks of soul-searching in this ballet-mad city, especially because Mr. Filin said he was sure he had been attacked over a professional grudge. Detectives worked their way through the ranks of the Bolshoi, becoming so entranced by the rarefied world of the balletthat they began asking Mr. Filin for tickets, he said in a recent interview.
Mr. Dmitrichenko’s name had not been raised publicly as a potential suspect. A theatrical, athletic dancer, he is a fierce advocate of classicism in the Bolshoi’s repertoire. He is also romantically linked with a ballerina in the company, Anzhelina Vorontsova, whose supporters blame Mr. Filin for stalling her career. Neither Mr. Dmitrichenko nor anyone representing him commented on Tuesday.
The company’s spokeswoman, Katerina Novikova, said the day’s revelations had given her hope that the theater could leave a dark chapter behind.
2013-02-28 M.Glotov. Zhirinovsky's dissertation mk.ru
2013-02-21 Alexei German Sr. died lenta.ru
2013-02-21 Varvara Faer. What is going on in the Christ the Saviour Temple? echo.msk.ru
2013-02-14 Felix Shamkhalov expelled from VAK lenta.ru
Shamkhalov is charged with 1.5B roubles fraud
2013-02-12 Yu.Khozhateleva. Tsiskaridze can be fired from GABT kp.ru
2013-02-08 Will GABT sue Tsiskaridze? lenta.ru
2013-02-08. Tsiskaridze: Assault on Filin is provocation against me
2013-02-08. Tsiskaridze: GABT leadership is tobe fired
2013-02-06 V.Rokotov. Nabokov's Ice Throne lgz.ru
2013-02-05 D.Malyanov. How cockroaches clean their antennae gazeta.ru
2013-02-05 V.Gordeev, N.Ziganshina. VAK chief Shamkhalov searched gazeta.ru
2013-02-04 Andriyanov leaves Kolmogorov school lenta.ru
2013-02-03 Bolshoi director Sergei Filin 'knows' attacker bbc.co.uk
The Bolshoi Ballet's artistic director says he is "absolutely certain" he knows who is behind an acid attack that left him badly injured last month.
Sergei Filin told the BBC he would not name names until investigators are ready to make an announcement.
He said he was sure the aim of the attack was to remove him as artistic director and destroy the prestigious Moscow ballet company's reputation.
Mr Filin is due to fly to Germany next week to continue his treatment.
His eyes were badly damaged in the 17 January attack in Moscow, and he said he had already undergone five operations and was under constant monitoring.
The 42-year-old said he knew that some people had disliked the way he was taking the ballet company, which is known for its infighting and rivalries, but believed he had no "obvious enemies".
He also said he wished he had taken more seriously the months of threats and harassment he had suffered, accepting now that it was "leading up to the tragedy to come".
2013-02-02 MSU rejects the claim that Andrianov is incompetent lenta.ru
2013-02-02 T.Yershova. Bolshoi's prima Lunkina is in conflict with V.Vinokur lenta.ru
2013-01-31 A.Popova. Fake dissertation factory uncovered in Moscow. Kupriyanov's thesis is a fake lenta.ru
2013-01-24 Mikhailovsky Theater in SPB searched in the case of 10B roubles fraud lenta.ru
2013-01-23 D.Lekuh. Forgotten Yunna Morits odnako.org
2013-01-18 Kathy Lally. Bolshoi Ballet’s artistic director attacked with acid washingtonpost.com
lenta.ru
vz.ru
The artistic director of the renowned, and in recent years strife-torn, Bolshoi Ballet was returning home from a theatrical celebration with the city’s glitterati when a masked man stepped out of the darkness and threw acid onto his face and eyes.
Sergei Filin, who was attacked about 11:30 p.m. Thursday, suffered third-degree burns. He underwent eye surgery Friday, according to Anatoly Iksanov, the Bolshoi’s director, who said Filin would be flown to Belgium for treatment at a burn clinic.
The Bolshoi’s artistic director occupies an all-powerful position, said former Bolshoi ballerina Anastasia Volochkova, inspiring anger and jealously. He decides who dances and who doesn’t, and who gets what part, making and breaking careers. Still, she was shocked that passion could take anyone so far.
“What’s happening there is a wild and scary fight,” she said on Ekho Moskvy radio Friday. “It’s a fight for roles.”
Volochkova became known here as “the fat ballerina” after the Bolshoi dismissed her in 2003, accusing her of being too heavy to lift. She weighed 109 pounds at the time, she said.
“In the past they dueled,” she said. “People used to cross swords or tried to have it out in a decent way. But splashing acid into the face .?.?. this is so low. It’s hard to make any comment.”
Iksanaov said there was grave concern that Filin might lose his sight, especially in one eye.
Katerina Novikova, press secretary for the Bolshoi, said that Filin had been repeatedly threatened in recent days. His tires had been slashed several times, his Facebook page was hacked and he had received ominous telephone calls.
“I am 100 percent confident that it is linked to his work,” Iksanov said on Russian television. “He is a man of principle and he has never made concessions. If he believed that a specific artist is not ready or not capable of performing a specific role, he declined him.”
2013-01-18 T.Yershova. Attack on Filin lenta.ru
2013-01-09 D.Bykov. The shit genre: Joe Wright's Anna Karenina openspace.ru
2013-01-05 Gerard Depardieu in Russia to get new citizenship bbc.co.uk
French actor Gerard Depardieu has arrived in Russia, where he has been granted citizenship and a private meeting with President Vladimir Putin.
A Kremlin spokesman said Mr Depardieu may receive his new Russian passport personally from the president.
The actor announced he was seeking Russian citizenship after the French government criticised his decision to move abroad to avoid higher taxes.
Last month Mr Putin had said he would be happy to welcome him to Russia.
The president will hold a private meeting with the actor in the Black Sea resort of Sochi later on Saturday, Mr Putin's spokesman said.
Earlier this week President Putin signed the decree granting Russian citizenship to Mr Depardieu.
The actor responded by writing an open letter saying: "I love your country, Russia - its people, its history, its writers. I love your culture, your intelligence."
Mr Depardieu went on describe Russia as "a great democracy, and not a country where the prime minister calls one of its citizens shabby".
2012-12-28 L.Goralik. 5 stories about professionalism lenta.ru
2012-12-26 Interview with V.Pozner echo.msk.ru
2012-12-25 RGTEU students answer the questions youtube.com
2012-12-20 Bishop Panteleimon Shatov condemns the adoption ban for the US pravmir.ru
2012-12-18 L.Kaganov. Adequate answer to Magnitsky law lleo.me
2012-12-14 P.Nikolskaya. How Andriyanov became the director of Kolmogorov school lenta.ru
2012-12-11 A.Kozlov. The falsity of Darwinism rusmirzp.com
2012-12-11 JONATHAN KANDELL. Galina Vishnevskaya, Soprano and Dissident, Dies at 86 nytimes.com
2012-12-08 A.Chubais: I always hated the Soviet Power business-gazeta.ru
2012-12-07 Odd English-Russian dictionary adme.ru
2012-12-06 Onishchenko: Kids' scepticism on Santa is a disaster gazeta.ru
2012-11-30 A.Yershov. Eugene V. Koonin on evolution lenta.ru
Eugene V. Koonin. The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution
2012-11-29 T.Yershova. Ivanovo Region bought Tarkovsky's archive for $2.4M lenta.ru
2012-11-28 K.Benyumov. Zadornov makes a film against the Norman theory lenta.ru
2012-11-27 Medvedev in the kindergarten perevodika.ru
2012-11-25 A.Balabanov considers making a movie about bandit youth of Stalin interfax.az
2012-11-22 A.Popova. A.Andriyanov - Strange director of Kolmogorov school lenta.ru
2012-11-19 Boris Strugatsky died izvestia.ru
2012-11-12 Philological faculty of SPB University will be reorganized lenta.ru
2012-11-11 I.Irtenyev. Congratulation to Obama gazeta.ru
2012-11-07 Kirill Frolov on the US moral crisis m.gazeta.ru
2012-11-03 A.Turner. Russian pseudo-elite and pseudo-intelligentzia forum-msk.org
2012-11-03 Pussy Riot face money problems lenta.ru
2012-10-31 Yu.Lyubimov is out of coma ria.ru
2012-10-20 Perpetuum Mobile will be discussed in Skolkovo community.sk.ru
2012-10-18 A.Petrov creates an animation for the 175th anniversary of Russian railroads itar-tass.com
2012-10-18 Say no to perverts in the theater ruskline.ru
2012-10-17 M.Gelman: An artist should not think about offending anybody gazeta.ru
2012-10-16 Chair of theology to open in MIFI lenta.ru
2012-10-16 Edpert: The policeman was not bitten by the dog lifenews.ru
2012-10-14 I.Demidova. Shocking dress of Tatyana Mikhalkova eurosmi.ru
2012-09-15 N.Markina. Eros and tanatos in the information field hij.ru
2012-09-07 A.Troitskiy. To those who envy Pussy Riot echo.msk.ru
2012-08-28 I.Rudenko. 200 years of Pushkin's wife rg.ru
2012-08-22 Free Pussy Riot, Free Russia avaaz.org
Facing 2 years in jail for singing a song criticizing President Putin in a church, a member of Pussy Riot gestured to the court and said in her show-trial's closing statements, "Despite the fact that we are physically here, we are freer than everyone sitting across from us ... We can say anything we want..."
Russia is steadily slipping into the grip of a new autocracy -- clamping down on public protest, allegedly rigging elections, intimidating media, banning gay rights parades for 100 years, and even beating critics like chess master Garry Kasparov. But many Russian citizens remain defiant, and Pussy Riot's eloquent bravery has galvanized the world’s solidarity. Now, our best chance to prove to Putin there is a price to pay for this repression lies with Europe.
The European Parliament is calling for an assets freeze and travel ban on Putin’s powerful inner circle who are accused of multiple crimes. Our community is spread across every corner of the world -- if we can push the Europeans to act, it will not only hit Putin's circle hard, as many bank and have homes in Europe, but also counter his anti-Western propaganda, showing him that the whole world is willing to stand up for a free Russia. Sign the petition on the right and tell everyone.
2012-08-16 Paul McCartney sends support to Russian punks boston.com
Paul McCartney has sent support to a Russian punk band whose members face prison for a stunt against President Vladimir Putin.
In a letter released Thursday, the former Beatle urged three members of all-female band Pussy Riot to ‘‘stay strong’’ and called on authorities to allow them freedom of speech.
McCartney said that ‘‘I and many others like me who believe in free speech will do everything in our power to support you and the idea of artistic freedom.’’
The band members have been in jail for more than five months because of an anti-Putin prank in Moscow’s main cathedral, and face a maximum seven years in jail.
Celebrities including Madonna and Bjork have called for them to be freed.
2012-08-13 Matt Trueman. Royal Court plans Pussy Riot readings on day of trial verdict guardian.co.uk
The Royal Court in London will stage verbatim readings of testimony given by members of Pussy Riot in their trial on the morning the verdict is due to be delivered.
Proposed by the playwright EV Crowe, the event will be part of a global day of action called for by the families and defence lawyers of the three bandmates, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich.
The women were arrested in March over a protest at a Moscow cathedral against the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. The verdict is due at 3pm local time on Friday.
An hour before, at 11am BST, British actors will take to a small stage in the Royal Court's cafe bar to deliver rehearsed readings of the testimony, translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale, who has been following live feeds from the trial. She described their words as "extraordinary, poetic, full of passion and innocence".
Crowe, whose latest play, Hero, opens at the Royal Court in November, will introduce the free event. She is also organising a symposium and debate on the subject later in the year, and said Pussy Riot's activism had "inspired me in a way no other cultural movement in my lifetime has captured my imagination.
"What Pussy Riot does is take a stand, through art, and then maximise its impact through social media. They are women who make me want to understand the world I'm living in, to write about it, and to be brave whatever the cost," Crowe said.
2012-08-11 Russian artists for Pussy Riot novayagazeta.ru
2012-08-10 A.Tolstova. Pussy Riot nominated for Kandinsky Award kommersant.ru
2012-08-10 Director of the Young Guards museum has peculiar looks 0642.ua
2012-08-10 K.Koksheneva. Expert on Pussy Riot lyrics ruskline.ru
2012-08-08 Marat Gelman on Pussy Riot snob.ru
2012-08-07 Slavoj Žižek on Pussy Riot: “The True Blashphemy” art-leaks.org
2012-08-05 S.Perovskaya. V.Gergiev supports Pussy Riots fognews.ru
Gergiev is victim of Pussy Riot hoax
mark-feygin.livejournal.com
2012-08-01 Tsentsiper and Kudryavtsev on Mosow media afisha.ru
2012-07-30 Z.Prilepin. Letter to Stalin svpressa.ru
2012-07-29 Historian Yu.Zhukov on 1937-38 repressions rusmirzp.com
2012-07-27 Russian Church and Nicholaus II asnecto.livejournal.com
2012-07-24 Russian school children don't read Dumas nr2.ru
2012-06-27 V.Lavrov. Charge Lenin with extremism novayagazeta.ru
2012-06-01 Yu.Saprykin. Boris Grois on Pussy Riot. You don't need to love modern art afisha.ru
2012-05-31 VGIK professor on new students mn.ru
2012-05-18 A.Konyaev. The game of Roulette is winnable lenta.ru
2012-04-16 Ks.Prilepskaya. Putin's kiss openspace.ru
2012-04-05 Chaplin compares Mozart with Britney Spears interfax-religion.ru
2012-03-22 A.Rodnyanskiy. Russians don't want to see reality on the screen vedomosti.ru
2012-03-22 V.Koretsky, K.Alekhin. Interview with V.Germanika openspace.ru
2012-03-14 Vishevskaya's mansion in SPB 1news.az
2012-02-24 T.Ershova. Dmitry Nabokov died lenta.ru
2012-02-22 I.Samakhova. Innovations disaster sib.fm
2012-02-22 R.Volobuev. Who will get Oscars in 2012? lenta.ru
2012-02-08 D.Volchek. 100 years of V.Kochetov svobodanews.ru
2012-02-06 S.Kartashevskaya. Interview with A.Zvyagintsev gazeta.ru
2012-01-29 Putin's kiss gets prize at Sundance festival newsru.com
2012-01-18 Chubais marries Smirnova ria.ru
2012-01-18 Gus-Khrustalny plant is closed vesti.ru
2012-01-12 A.Pokoi. A word about oncologics odnako.org
2012-01-10 Bakhtin could be a plagiarist gazeta.ru
2012-01-10 Is ITEPh dead? sbul.livejournal.com
2011-12-16 A.Zvyagintsev plans four new movies kinopoisk.ru
2011-12-16 Yu.Goland. Split of USSR was political, not economical gazeta.ru
2011-11-15 T.Yershova. Osipova and Vasilyev leave GABT lenta.ru
2011-09-21 Citadel and Oscar academy chaskor.ru
2011-09-15 Yu.Rost. 70-ieth anniversary of Yu.Norshtein novayagazeta.ru
2011-09-01 Ye.Nadtochiy. Humanism of another man enadtochij.phronesis.ru
2011-08-31 V.Anzikeev. Tyutchev in Germany dw-world.de
2011-08-17 L.Latynina. Europe, you're crazy novayagazeta.ru
2011-08-15 S.Rakhlin. American serials better than movies kommersant.ru
2011-08-06 V.Kornilov. Savik Shuster in Afghanistan 2000.net.ua
2011-07-09 Medvedev did not congatrulate the Vitebsk cultural festival ont.by
2011-06-26 M.Raikina. Lyubimov quits Taganka mk.ru
Russia theatre legend quits in fury after 50 years
novopol.ru
rg.ru
lenta.ru
news.argumenti.ru
2011-06-24 Ye.Margolit. Mark Donskoy kommersant.ru
2011-06-22 Vandals steal bronze cross from Lotman grave english.ruvr.ru
The grave of prominent Soviet scholar Yuri Lotman has been vandalized in Estonia.
Vandals stole the bronze cross from the scientist’s grave at the Tartu cemetery.
The cross is hollow inside and is of no particular value for scrap metals dealers.
Yuri Lotman was the founder of structural semiotics in culturology and one of the founders of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. He was a member of numerous scientific academies and hosted a television program about Russian culture in the late 1980s.
2011-06-19 Artillery archives liquidated newsru.com
2011-06-14 Mikhalkov participated in the destruction of church in Belarus respublika.info
2011-06-10 S.Uvarov. Interview with A.Sokurov izvestia.ru
2011-06-07 O.Taranenko. E.Volodarsky on "Dostoyevsky" saltt.ru
2011-04-19 Z.Troitskaya. Burned by the Sun - 2 chaskor.ru
2011-03-22 Cultural and Spiritual Russian Orthodox Center in Paris by Arch group and Sade Sarl dezeen.com
static.dezeen.com
Russian architects Arch-group and French studio Sade Sarl last week won an international competition to design a Russian Orthodox church and cultural centre beside the Eiffel Tower in Paris
An important aspect from the point of view of urban planning is that the design project features an emphatic rounded ‘Parisian corner’ corresponding to the principles which have shaped the existing layout of the surrounding built-up area. This corner and the northern façade shape the view from Pont de l’Alma, which is an important and lively main road linking the 7th and 8th arrondissements.
2011-03-18 Corruption scandal in Tretyakov Gallery rbcdaily.ru
2011-03-18 Materials for opera "Jewess" stolen fontanka.ru
2011-03-14 A.Shumskiy. The End of Japanese Miracle ruskline.ru
2011-02-25 Pushkin's tale edited by Kuban cleric interfax-religion.ru
2011-01-05 Ye.Petukhova. Arvo Part: Khodorkovsky is a hero and a martyr rus.delfi.ee
2010-12-29 Russian movies made just 14.5% of the post-Soviet box office rian.ru
2010-12-28 D.Goryacheva. Konchalovsky's Nut Cracker gazeta.ru
2010-11-30 Photos: Back to the past ziza.qip.ru
2010-11-27 Patriarch Kirill calls Slavs animals and second rate humans news.babr.ru
2010-11-25 Russian choreographical education is in danger bolshoiacademy.net
2010-11-15 MSU comission on Barsenkov, Vdovin textbook hist.msu.ru
2010-10-26 N.Mikhalkov. Manifesto of Educated Conservatism polit.ru
2010-09-16 A.Arkhangelskiy. Department tvkultura.ru
2010-09-16 MSU is not in the 200 Best World Schools vedomosti.ru
2010-09-07 Ye.Starikov. Translation of Heller's Catch-22 snob.ru
2010-08-31 M.Tsyganov. The Sumatran tiger rian.ru
2010-08-23 D.Bykov. 130 years of A.Grin novayagazeta.ru
2010-07-18 Meeting with Sergei Solovyev 5-tv.ru
2010-07-07 Russian pianist faces Thai paedophile rape charge msnbc.msn.com
Award-winning Russian pianist Mikhail Pletnev has been arrested at a Thai beach resort, accused of raping a boy, police said on Wednesday.
Pletnev, 53, an acclaimed pianist and conductor of the Russian National Orchestra, was arrested in Pattaya charged with raping a 14-year-old Thai boy and appearing in compromising photographs with several others.
"We received a tip-off from a detained Thai man who is involved in a prostitution ring. And we received more information from the child's parents, the child himself and other witnesses," Police Lieutenant-Colonel Omsin Sukkanka said.
Pletnev was served with an arrest warrant while having dinner at a restaurant on Monday evening. He was released on 300,000 baht ($9,000) bail on Tuesday but will have to ask for court permission to leave the country.
He faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison if found guilty.
Police said Pletnev had a house and several businesses in Pattaya, a popular tourist destination 150 km (90 miles) from Bangkok.
2010-07-02 Marc Kaufman. Russian mathematician wins $1 million prize, but he appears to be happy with $0 washingtonpost.com
gazeta.ru
Three months ago, a famously impoverished Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman was awarded the prestigious $1 million Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize for his groundbreaking work -- having solved a problem of three-dimensional geometry that had resisted scores of brilliant mathematicians since 1904.
Thursday, the institute announced that Perelman, known equally for his brilliance and his eccentricities, formally and finally turned down the award and the money. He didn't deserve it, he told a Russian news service, because he was following a mathematical path set by another.
Perelman had already turned down several of the world's top awards in mathematics. And when he solved the Poincaré conjecture, he ignored the peer-review process and simply posted his three-part solution online. That was in 2003.
It took other mathematicians two years to determine that he had indeed solved the problem.
"The community knew about Perelman, and that's why they took him seriously," Carlson said. "But what he did is definitely not the way things are normally done."
Immediately after his postings, Perelman was invited to lecture at several top American universities, and did so with aplomb. Speaking in fluent English, he wowed his math colleagues and, after returning to Russia, continued to communicate via e-mail with some about his work. Within several years, however, he stopped responding and left the math world, Carlson said.
Perelman lives in a bare-bones apartment in St. Petersburg with his elderly mother; a poor and reclusive man with long, wild hair and, in his photos, a look of fierce pride. Carlson said that when he spoke with Perelman, the man had quit his research and teaching job at Russia's top institute and did not appear to have other employment.
2010-06-11 Tatyana Drubich is 50 rian.ru
2010-05-22 M.Baker. Cold welcome in Cannes for Mikhalkov's Burned by the Sun - 2 bbc.co.uk
2010-05-03 Spb artist rapes MSU student gazeta.ru
2010-04-27 Why people ignore Mikhalkov's movie mk.ru
2010-04-18 G.Malinetskiy. The Future of Russia
2010-02-15 M.Lesko. It does not matter whether "School" is good or bad odnakoj.ru
2010-02-09 Screening of "School" stopped lenta.ru
2010-01-12 V.Nesterov. School by V.Germanika gazeta.ru
school-serial.net
Interview with V.Germanika
G.Nekhoroshev
razgovorchiki.ru
2010-01-01 Boris Strugatsky accuses Cameron of plagiarism news.mail.ru
2009-12-14 S.Guriev, D.Livanov, K.Severinov. 6 myths of the Russian Academy of Sciences expert.ru
2009-12-12 Judge who considered Kuklachev-Verbitsky case died internovosti.ru
2009-12-04 M.Kucherskaya. Yet another icon story old.vedomosti.ru
2009-12-01 Kuklachev sues Verbitsky lenta.ru
2009-11-29 M.Babkin. Lungin's Tsar lebed.com
2009-11-19 A.Vaitkun. Interview with Kira Muratova kira-muratova.narod.ru
2009-11-18 Aurora will leave the Russian Navy grani.ru
2009-11-02 M.Lemutkina. When basic literacy is lost mk.ru
2009-10-30 New MSU students are illiterate nr2.ru
2009-10-20 A.Ashkerov. Institue of philosophy liberty.ru
2009-10-18 Experts against the Gazprom skyscraper in SPB 1tv.ru
2009-09-28 Only 40% of MSU students pass YeGE test lenta.ru
2009-06-28 A.Genis. Jaqckson - genius of kids' rock svobodanews.ru
2009-05-24 Putin at Solzhenitsyn's grave cache.daylife.com
2009-05-22 Rita Rusakova. Alexander Menzhirov died kommersant.ru
2009-05-15 P.Nikolskaya. Shirling fired gazeta.ru
2009-05-14 Change of rector in GITIS gazeta.ru
2009-05-06 Patriarch Kirill on the victory in WW2 rusk.ru
2009-05-05 Lyrical Taras Bulba
2009-02-14 K.Krylov. Gender Behavior and Crisis liberty.ru
2008-11-20 B.Klin. What will happen to Rublev's Trinity? izvestia.ru
2008-11-14 A.Burnosov. Paper Soldier by A.German zapravdu.ru
2008-10-29 World media on Magomayev newsazerbaijan.ru
2008-10-25 Muslim Magomayev died lenta.ru
2008-10-08 S.Sinyakov. Admiral - movie about Kolchak gazeta.ru
2008-10-01 M.Baskov. Boris Yefimov died lenta.ru
2008-08-28 Kolchak is suggested for Russian Academy lenta.ru
2008-08-26 M.Sokolov. V.Kikabidze: Burial for the imperial culture izvestia.ru
2008-08-14 B.Akunin: Russia can't afford to get hysterical on Georgia news.bbc.co.uk
2008-08-05 A.Ashkerov. Death of Solzhenitsyn russ.ru
2008-06-30 V.Arnold. Three portraits polit.ru
2008-06-26 O.Balla. V.Mikhailin on Dionysus exlibris.ng.ru
2008-06-20 Igor Chubais. Myths about WW2 inosmi.ru
2008-05-24 Yu.Lipski, V.Nedoshivin. Brodskiy and Marina Basmanova rg.ru
2008-02-28 Jaroslaw Pietrzak. Golden Fish Named Wajda inosmi.ru
2008-02-07 Architectural losses of Moscow kommersant.ru
2008-01-24 S.Nekhamkin. Yevg.Polivanov argumenti.ru
2008-01-22 Feuchtwanger and Stalin ng.ru
2007-10-16 Artists' letter to Putin on the third term rg.ru
2007-07-25 800 years of Rumi vz.ru
2007-06-03 K.Novikov. Frank Lloyd Wright kommersant.ru
2007-04-09 A.Mekhanik, D.Medovnikov. Karen Svasyan expert.ru
2007-03-15 N.Zeya. Hermitage thief Zavadskiy gets 5 years gazeta.ru
2007-03-06 Anti-Darwinist Shraiber and Russian Academy of Sciences jesuschrist.ru
2007-02-26 I.Kravets. Their Puskin expert.ru
2007-02-22 N.Radulova. Who is Dunya Smirnova? radulova.livejournal.com
2007-02-07 K.Lodygin. Lungin's "Island" as a symptom zvezda.ru
2007-02-04 Ilya Kormiltsev died grani.ru
2007-01-28 Lungin's "The Island" takes 6 Golden Eagle awards lenta.ru
2006-12-29 K.Krylov. On the glamourous cattishness nazlobu.ru
2006-12-25 A.Korolyev. Seven sins in the great movies expert.ru
2006-11-24 N.Shergina. Enough of "unneeded people" ogoniok.com
2006-11-21 Ye.Salnikova. Dead Don vz.ru
2006-11-20 A.Payevskuy. The Water Mystery gazeta.ru
2006-11-03 V.Chernysheva. 75 years of Monica Vitti ng.ru
2006-10-27 F.Rostotskiy. Ioseliani's Autumn Gardens vremya.ru
2006-10-23 Wrong math from MSU smoney.ru
2006-10-13 A.Dolin. Von Trier's last film is about Danes mn.ru
2006-10-04 V.Nesterov. Director of Petropavlovskaya Fortress museum sacked gazeta.ru
2006-09-28 P.Makarov. 106 years of Boris Yefimov rus.postimees.ee
2006-09-27 Ye.Lozhkina. Rastropovich: In the labyrinth of Shostakovich ng.ru
2006-09-25 A.Shcherbakov. Khrennikov: Shostakovich was no martyr pravda.ru
2006-09-13 APN discussion of the Russian rock apn.ru
2006-08-01 Ye.Blinova, D.Simakin, D.Borisov. The museum disaster ng.ru
2006-07-21 26 rules of the Russian language volod.ru
2006-07-06 A.Zmeul. Reconstruction of "Kid's world" vremya.ru
2006-06-29 Jackson, f* off! corsika.livejournal.com
2006-06-16 N.Muravyeva. Valery Bryusov ng.ru
2006-06-13 Dean Reed and his death rian.ru
2006-06-09 S.Mazayev. Dan Brown's "teofeminism" belongs to pigs apn.ru
2006-06-08 Ya.Butakov. History and meaning of European russophobia apn.ru
2006-06-04 Ivan Ilyin's archive returns to Russia grani.ru
Ilyin blog iljinru.tsygankov.ru
Articles
National socialism. New spirit
On coming Russia
State: corporation or hierarchy?
Why we believe in Russia
2006-06-04 Z.Moshkovtseva. History of underware ng.ru
2006-06-02 Ye.Sazhneva. Real story behind "East-West" mk.ru
2006-05-30 Patriarch Alexiy II: "Da Vinci Code" is immoral grani.ru
2006-05-29 Ya.Shustov. Manuel Sarkisyanz: Colonial imperialsim was the testing ground of racism apn.ru
2006-05-25 L.Malyukova. Yu.Norstein on Russian multiplication 2006.novayagazeta.ru
2006-05-25 ROC condemns the Da Vinci code grani.ru
2006-05-23 P.Svyatenkov. The Da Vinci code - fight for Christ's legacy apn.ru
Pat Buchanan. Whose God may we mock?
2006-05-20 Soviet socialist realist art
2006-05-19 K.Krylov. Alexander Zinoviev apn.ru
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
2006-05-17 Ye.Barabash. Dr.Zhivago without Pasternak ng.ru
2006-05-13 V.Shevchenko. The history of "The sacred war". Bode and Lebedev-Kumach uni-potsdam.de
2006-05-11 A.Zinovyev died grani.ru
2006-05-03 L.Danilkin. M.Kantor's "Drawing manual" msk.afisha.ru
2006-04-19 Ye.Barabash. P.Todorovsky on Russian cinema ng.ru
2006-04-14 Father Grigory. Ethic problems of "Judas Testament" russ.ru
2006-04-14 Medved kotoeb.livejournal.com
lenta.ru
Original image
preved.krosafcheg.ru
2006-04-12 Yu.Shtutina. 100 years of S.Beckett grani.ru
2006-04-11 V.Primozhurov. Mona Lisa techique uncovered italynews.ru
2006-03-31 D.Volodikhin. Dr.Lem apn.ru
2006-03-28 M.Borisov. St.Lem: Thinking and writing ocean grani.ru
2006-03-28 New animation by Ruslan Paushu lenta.ru
img.lenta.ru
goblin-gaga.livejournal.com
2006-03-06 80 years of Andrzej Wajda news.izvestia.ru
2006-03-03 40 years of Akhmatova's death rian.ru
2006-03-02 O.Gertman. Semiotics of madness exlibris.ng.ru
2006-03-02 Ye.Yakovleva. Remembering Mikhail Gefter elena-yakovleva.livejournal.com
2006-02-26 Kira Muratova gets Nika award og.ru
2006-02-16 swar_srb. Pinocchio in Perm swar-srb.livejournal.com
2006-02-15 Composer Andrei Petrov died lenta.ru
img.lenta.ru
lenta.ru img.lenta.ru
2006-02-14 A.Korolyev. Anna German rian.ru
2006-02-14 Ye.Shesternina, N.Popova. Will Zanussi become Polish Ambassador to Russia? izvestia.ru
2006-02-10 B.Sokolov. In the first round. Inmates on TV grani.ru
2006-02-08 Ye.Barabash. Russia is not invited to Berlin film festival ng.ru
2006-02-02 N.Klimontovich. "Master and Margaret" and perils of popular literature gazeta.ru
2006-02-01 FSB: Film "Bitches" is historically wrong. There were no schools for kid guerillas in USSR rian.ru
2006-01-31 V.Shokhina. In the First Circle: The Powers That Be look better than inmates ng.ru
2006-01-30 A.Kostylev. Demon and jeans. Solzhenitsyn's "In the first circle" gazeta.ru
gazeta.ru gazeta.ru gazeta.ru gazeta.ru gazeta.ru
2006-01-19 Ye.Vitkovsky. Russian translations of foreign poetry exlibris.ng.ru
2006-01-18 V.Nesterov. Panfilov's In the First Circle gazeta.ru
gazeta.ru gazeta.ru gazeta.ru gazeta.ru
2006-01-17 St.Lem inosmi.ru
2006-01-15 O.Kuchkina. Vladimir Bogomolov magazines.russ.ru
lib.ru
V.Bogomolov on G.Vladimov
2006-01-13 Ye.Natarov. T.Eidelman and N.Sokolov on school history gazeta.ru
2006-01-12 V.Nesterov. Usov's book on Chinese erotics gazeta.ru
2006-01-12 Ya.Shenkman. A.Rossomakhin on Kharms exlibris.ng.ru
2006-01-05 A.Dolin. No magic in Master and Margarita grani.ru
2006-01-02 G.Borisov. Pride and Prejudice lenta.ru
2005-12-31 D.Olshankiy. Master and Margarita: not a good serial globalrus.ru
2005-12-30 S.Karamayev. Obituaries of 2005 lenta.ru
2005-12-29 A.Kostylev. Match Point. God does not play tennis gazeta.ru
gazeta.ru gazeta.ru gazeta.ru gazeta.ru
2005-12-29 V.Matizen. Interview with Ryazanov newizv.ru
2005-12-26 A.Kostylev. Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies gazeta.ru
gazeta.ru gazeta.ru gazeta.ru gazeta.ru gazeta.ru
IMDB. Where the Truth Lies (2005): imdb.com
2005-12-25 D.Kharitonov. Anbsolute beginners. Non-humanistic generation globalrus.ru
2005-12-23 A.Korolyov. New documents on Mayakovsky's suicide rian.ru
2005-12-21 Yu.Bogomolov. Serial "Brezhnev" rian.ru
2005-12-20 A.Etkind. Bulgakov's Voland: Ambassador Bullitt or Mayakovsky? pravda.ru
Wiki on the novel
Wiki on Bullitt
2005-12-18 Philologists Meletinskiy and Broitman died grani.ru
2005-12-16 A.Korolyev. The Master and Margaret: between Christ and Satan rian.ru
Bulgakov
I.Kamirov
Lenta. A.Amzin, A.Lomkin
2005-12-16 Ye.Kutlovskaya. A.German Jr. presents Garpastum ng.ru
2005-12-13 Z.Mashkovtseva. History of Christmas celebrations in Italy ng.ru
2005-12-11 Bortko's "The Master and Margaret" starts 12/19 og.ru
2005-12-09 Robert Sheckley died grani.ru
Sheckley img.lenta.ru img.lenta.ru
A.Amzin's obituary
lenta.ru
2005-12-08 Long life of Georgy Zhzhenov gazeta.ru
gazeta.ru
grani.ru
izvestia.ru
imdb.com
2005-12-08 V.Sergeev. Bush attacked in Nobel speech gazeta.ru
2005-12-07 A.Korolev. 87th anniversary of Solzhenitsyn rian.ru
2005-12-07 Dina Goder. Comsomol Oedipus from Lithiania grani.ru
2005-12-07 T.Rasskazova. Playwrite Yury Arabov on TV serial Doctor Zhivago grani.ru
2005-12-05 Linguist Sergei Toporov died grani.ru
2005-11-30 I.Kukharenko, Ye.Biryukova. Rostropovich breaks contract with Bolshoi Theater izvestia.ru
2005-11-29 A.Dolin. Moscow Film Museum to close grani.ru
2005-11-24 Vernan on Trojan war exlibris.ng.ru
2005-11-23 Pugacheva and Kirkorov divorce grani.ru
L.Syrnikova. Pugacheva, Kirkorov and Aroyan
2005-11-08 A.Metelkina. Gasparov, Fowles, Trofimov - wrong necrologs globalrus.ru
2005-11-07 John Fowles died grani.ru
Fowles
Gazeta
BBC. Writer John Fowles dies aged 79
Wiki on Fowles
2005-11-07 Mikhail Gasparov died grani.ru
Gasparov img.lenta.ru grani.ru
Lev Rubinstein
N.Grintser
V.Sonkin
Lenta
2005-11-01 O.Gamzanov. New dawn newsru.com
2005-10-27 Alex Epstein. The Russian soul. Interview with Nikita Mikhalkov haaretz.com
2005-10-27 N.Muravyeva. Anna Akhmatova's Men ng.ru
2005-10-26 T.Bogdanova. Anna Kovalchuk in "Master and Margaret" rosbalt.ru
img.rosbalt.ru img.rosbalt.ru img.rosbalt.ru
Part 2: rosbalt.ru
img.rosbalt.ru img.rosbalt.ru
2005-10-23 Yu.Bogomolov. Mikhalkov's Red-and-white answer for Russian question grani.ru
2005-10-21 N.Klimontovich. Tennessee Williams in Russia gazeta.ru
2005-10-21 Putin visits Mikhalkov on his birthday lenta.ru
2005-10-21 Vladimir Novikov. Who’s Signor Buratino? english.intelligent.ru
2005-10-21 Ye.Kruglovskaya. Interview with Alexei Uchitel ng.ru
2005-10-20 I.Chernyshev. Memorial to radiator opned in Samara news8.thdo.bbc.co.uk
newsimg.bbc.co.uk
newsimg.bbc.co.uk
2005-10-20 Nikita Mikhalkov condemns Konchalovsky's decison to establish new film festival rian.ru
2005-10-19 Nick Paton Walsh. Solzhenitsyn papers destroyed as old retreat goes up in flames guardian.co.uk
Solzhenitsyn
Lenta
A fire has destroyed the country cottage where Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the former Soviet dissident, wrote some of his most famous works and stored part of his family's archive.
The dacha near the village of Rodzhestvo, outside Moscow, was acquired by Solzhenitsyn in 1965. The dissident retreated there after his expulsion from the Soviet Union Of Writers and wrote the seminal account of his time in the Soviet prison camps system, The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize for literature in 1970 and returned to post-Soviet Russia in 1994 after 20 years' exile.
Article continues
An official at the local fire department said the dacha burned down on Wednesday night. The newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets said it was being rented by a Georgian man and that faulty electrics had sparked the blaze. It was unclear how much of the writer's old papers remained there, although the newspaper said there were rare photographs and writings about the writer's life.
The dacha was caught up in the tumultuous relationship between the writer and his ex-wife Natalya Reshetovskaya, who died two years ago aged 84.
Solzhenitsyn is said to have sent her a poem that read: "At midnight, hiding my lips in a glass/ I whisper incomprehensibly to others/ 'My love, we have waited a long time!'. She replied, telling him for the first time about her plans to remarry: "I was created to love you alone, but fate decreed otherwise."
On Solzhenitsyn's release from prison, they remarried but that ended when the writer had an affair with a student. As the marriage fell apart, Ms Reshetovskaya was said to have planned to throw herself under a train, leaving her husband a note in blood. When the pair divorced for the second time in 1972, Ms Reshetovskaya said she took a picture of them together and buried it in the dacha's garden, making a symbolic grave for their relationship. Solzhenitsyn was later said to have unearthed the picture.
2005-10-17 Anatoly Korolyov. Chekhov unmasked en.rian.ru
img.rian.ru
The Nezavisimaya Gazeta publishing house hails the new biography as a "true sensation." It writes: "An entirely unfamiliar, new Chekhov emerges from family correspondence, recollections of relatives, colleagues, lovers, friends and enemies, and other materials prudishly hushed up in the Soviet era."
The latest battle on the subject took place in connection with a book by Serena Vitali, an Italian expert in Russian literature, called "Pushkin's Button". It includes the first full publication of correspondence between Dantes and his stepfather, baron Hekkern.
The letters prove beyond doubt that Natalia, although in love with Dantes, remained faithful to her husband. Dantes himself wrote about it in a tone of tearful admiration. Nevertheless, Russian experts on Pushkin subjected Vitali's book to severe criticism, and their resistance was so strong that the first edition of the book was published in Riga: Moscow and St. Petersburg literary circles banished Vitali from the intellectual scene. The scientific elite was up in arms over the notion that Pushkin's wife showed even platonic interest in another man. There was a joke in philological circles: the best wife for Pushkin would be the Pushkin scholar Shchegolev.
Professor Rayfield has dared to show the Russian public a womanizing Chekhov. The scholar spent several years working in Russian archives and has now published an account of the classic's love life. It shows that Chekhov was far from the prude he was often shown to be, and enjoyed numerous love affairs. He wrote frankly about them in letters to his brothers and friends, calling his partners "dogs", "fools" and even "the corn of my soul."
2005-10-17 Cadets nominated for Emmy lenta.ru
2005-10-17 O.Finitskaya. TV film about Yesenin: there was no suicide rian.ru
N.Kanygina
Ye.Lesin. Why TV killed Yesenin
Wiki on Yesenin
2005-10-15 Ye.Stafyeva. Inteview with Leonid Blekher club.fom.ru
2005-10-14 Jazz musician Oleg Lundsterm died at 90 rg.ru
2005-10-13 V.Shokhina. Sinyavsky's "Cats's House" exlibris.ng.ru
2005-10-13 Yu.Shtutina. Harold Pinter - poet and citizen lenta.ru
2005-10-07 N.Aleksandrov. 80 years of A.Sinyavsky izvestia.ru
2005-10-04 Linguist Starostin died grani.ru
Sergei Strarostin
S.Novoprudsky. Set of words. Starostin's obituary
gzt.ru
polit.ru
elementy.ru
2005-10-04 Philologist Alexander Chudakov died grani.ru
2005-09-30 N.Muravyeva. Freud and women ng.ru
2005-09-30 V.Gudkova. Tonino Guerra's butterflies ng.ru
2005-09-18 100 years of Greta Garbo lenta.ru
Garbo in 1928
In Wild Orchids
In Ninotchka
In the 1950-ies
Wiki on Garbo
2005-09-17 A.Chastitsyna. The idiocy of Da Vinci Code exlibris.ng.ru
2005-09-12 V.Kichin. German's Garpastum film.ru
2005-09-05 M.Artemyev. 100 years of Arthur Koestler globalrus.ru
2005-09-02 I.Pronin. Revolutionary paedophiles. New novel by D.Bykov gazeta.ru
2005-09-02 M.Pozdnyaev. V.Kirsanov's "69": essays on Russian gay celebrities newizv.ru
2005-09-02 N.Klimontovich. Cursing in beresta gazeta.ru
2005-09-02 S.Varshavchik. Parfenov's documentary on the Crimean War ng.ru
2005-09-02 V.Voinovich. Life and unusual adventures of writer Voinovich, ch 27 newizv.ru
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Ch 25
Ch 24
Ch 23
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Ch 1
2005-09-01 Sand Sculptures at Moscow Zoo mosnews.com
Central entrance to the Moscow zoo
Gallery
2005-09-01 T.Romashenkova. Living with wolves rg.ru
2005-08-31 M.Pozdnyaev. Fight against Tsereteli goes on newizv.ru
2005-08-27 Ye.Gaidar on Strugatskiye brothers echo.msk.ru
2005-08-23 Abdulov almost hanged himself dni.ru
2005-08-21 A.Gordeeva. No pornography in Bayan Shiryanov's book newizv.ru
2005-08-21 K.Bakanov. Pseudo-Masyanya capitulates newizv.ru
O.Kuvaev
01/13/05: K.Bakanov. Kuvaev fights Mus-TV
2005-08-21 Z.Milman. M.Asatvyeva-Karyakina on V.Astafyev rg.ru
2005-08-20 M.Borisov. 85 years of Ray Bradbury lenta.ru
2005-08-16 N.Klimontovich. Ryazanov's optimism ng.ru
2005-08-11 S.Shargunov. 110 years of M.Zoshchenko exlibris.ng.ru
2005-08-10 A.Kostylev. Battle in Heaven by Reygadas gazeta.ru
Batalla en el cielo (2005)
Shot from the film
2005-08-10 A.Kostylev. Trier's Dear Wendy in Moscow gazeta.ru
Dear Wendy (2005)
Scenes with guns gazeta.ru gazeta.ru gazeta.ru
2005-08-08 M.Lyubimov. British Spy novel ng.ru
2005-08-05 Ye.Ageeva. Maniacal erotics of N.Gorelov blotter.ru
2005-07-25 Sergei Roy. Russian Hamlet with a Guitar english.intelligent.ru
A.Zhidkova. Mystery of Vysotsky's death
N.Kabanova. 25 years of Vysotsky's death
2005-07-21 Andrew Osborn. Russians turn their backs on Dostoevsky news.independent.co.uk
The Soviet Union prided itself on being "the best-read country in the world" with children able to recite large chunks of Alexander Pushkin's works by heart.
"Literacy is the path to Communism", proclaimed a striking agitprop poster from 1920 depicting a vivacious figure on a winged red horse with book in hand.
But new surveys commissioned by Russia's National Library show that ordinary Russians have turned their backs on literature and that those who do read prefer Danielle Steel to Fyodor Dostoevsky. The surveys found that 37 per cent of Russians never read books, that 52 per cent never bought them, and that only 23 per cent considered themselves active readers.
The Russian National Library said the rot had set in during the 1990s in the anarchic post-Soviet period when people needed light relief as opposed to harrowing psychological reads.
2005-07-18 N.Kostylev. The interpreter gazeta.ru
N.Kidman gazeta.ru
N.Kidman, S.Penn
2005-07-02 I.Pronin. F.Werfel's Black Mass gazeta.ru
2005-06-21 V.Moist. Erotic drawings by Fellini in Moscow gazeta.ru
2005-06-20 I.Sabo visits Moscow rg.ru
2005-06-08 Monument to Alexander II erected in Moscow ng.ru
Monument
Ye.Pichugina. Errors on the monument to Alexander II
2005-06-07 Yu.Latynina. Jahannam, or, See You in Hell ej.ru
2005-05-29 Two artifacts stolen from Kunstcamera lenta.ru
2005-05-24 100 years of M.Sholokhov vip.lenta.ru
2005-05-24 Ya.Artyushenko. Author of "Night Watch" helps Robert Sheckley kp.ru
2005-05-19 S.Leskov Academicians boo Russian education and science minister izvestia.ru
2005-05-16 S.Karamaev. Natalia Gundareva died vip.lenta.ru
2005-05-12 V.Kichin. Interview with Vadim Abdrashitov: Gambling instead of cinema rg.ru
2005-05-08 V.Nesterov. "Quiet mornings" in China gazeta.ru
2005-04-20 Exhibition of artist Edik Katykhin opens in Moscow eg.ru
2005-04-18 V.Golitsyna. Manezh: restoration or crude fake? vip.lenta.ru
2005-04-14 Donald Rayfield. Anton Chekhov: A Life amazon.com
exlibris.ng.ru
T.Shchepkina-Kuperni, L.Yavorskaya, A.Chekhov
users.dircon.co.uk
2005-04-12 Monument to Stalin (and others) in Volgograd lenta.ru
2005-04-12 Russian intellectuals against Stalin's monument grani.ru
2005-04-11 A.Zakharyev. Interview with Istvan Szabo polit.ru
2005-04-07 New comedy by Kira Muratova gazeta.ru
2005-04-03 The Simpsons cartoon series goes on trial in Russia english.pravda.ru
english.pravda.ru
One of Moscow's district courts starts hearing the lawsuit, which Muscovite Igor Smykov filed against the Ren TV Russian television company almost three years ago. The lawsuit was filed on the allegation that "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" cartoons, which the company regularly airs, bring psychological harm to children and their parents. The claimant demands the TV company should exclude the above-mentioned cartoons from its schedule and pay 300,000 rubles of moral damage compensation. Igor Smykov believes that the two cartoon series propagandize violence, brutality, drugs and the cult of sex.
Igor Smykov believes that "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" cartoons present a grotesque image of a family. Parents are portrayed as mentally retarded individuals there, whereas their children resemble ugly idiots. Being a legal expert himself, Igor Smykov classified the activity of the above-mentioned television company as interference in private family life. The claimant's writ contains references to the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the Law about Media and the Law about Basic Guarantees for Children's Rights.
The claimant's lawyer, Larisa Pavlova, quoted phrases of several characters from the cartoon series: "Where's our son? He is dealing drugs." "Hello, you sweet legs, breasts and buttocks." "We have guests, one of them is a homosexual." I love cocaine, I go crazy for cocaine." "My penis should get on stage."
Natalia Markova, a specialist of the Institute for socio-economic problems of the population, conducted a psychological expertise within the scope of the litigation. The expert concluded that "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" cartoons were abundant with the propaganda of violence. "The cartoons can cause severe damage to the psychological, spiritual and moral health of an individual, especially to children of pre-school age," Natalia Markova said.
2005-04-01 A.Lebedev. Mystery of American Declaration of Independence artlebedev.ru
2005-03-25 O.Dunayevskaya. Babel's grandson in the US ng.ru
2005-03-18 Dictionary "Russian Writers": closed down or downrated? regnum.ru
2005-03-16 Russian Orhodoxal Church and Vatican condemn The Da Vinci Code as a hereshy lenta.ru
2005-03-11 P.Bologov. Ehnaton was not killed vip.lenta.ru
2005-03-11 Ye.Lyubarskaya. Sorokin's children vip.lenta.ru
2005-03-04 Bolshoi Theater will be closed for reconstruction lenta.ru
2005-03-04 Karachentsev is alive, but his brain is damaged lenta.ru
2005-03-04 Tom Parfitt. Bolshoi embroiled in row over 'pornographic' opera guardian.co.uk
A scandal has engulfed the Bolshoi Theatre after pro-Kremlin MPs ordered an investigation into an opera which they claim is "vulgar and pornographic".
Rosenthal's Children, which features a godlike figure who creates clones of famous composers, was to open later this month.
The libretto was written by Vladimir Sorokin, a controversial postmodernist author, whose novel Blue Lard caused outrage in Russia with scenes of homosexual liaisons between the Soviet leaders Stalin and Khrushchev.
State Duma deputies from the United Russia party instructed parliament's culture committee to launch an inquiry into the opera on Wednesday.
MPs in the pro-Kremlin parliament voted 226 to 12 to launch an inquiry, expected to report within a fortnight. Mr Neverov denied attempts at censorship, suggesting the opera could be performed elsewhere.
But the Bolshoi's general director, Anatoly Iksanov, reacted furiously yesterday, saying the inquiry smacked of the restrictions imposed on writers including Boris Pasternak in the 1930s.
polit.ru
2005-02-25 A.Sokolov. A.German: "Hard to be a God" is a movie without hope ng.ru
2005-02-22 One Vakselberg's Faberge Egg can be fake lenta.ru
2005-02-18 V.Rogova. Strange fate of Dziga Vertov ng.ru
ng.ru
Jonathan Dawson. Dziga Vertov sensesofcinema.com
sensesofcinema.com
2005-02-17 Ronald Bergan. Original Potemkin beats the censors after 79 years film.guardian.co.uk
When The Battleship Potemkin was first shown in Moscow in December 1925, finished just in time to commemorate the (partially successful) 1905 Revolution, it had an uninspired musical accompaniment played on an organ. The film played to half-empty theatres, because audiences, then as now, preferred the products from Hollywood.
Box-office figures were exaggerated by the authorities to demonstrate to the rest of the world that there was a large Soviet audience for Soviet films.
A short while later, The Battleship Potemkin was shown in Berlin where it became an enormous hit, moving from a small cinema on the Friederichstrasse to twelve cinemas around Berlin. Encouraged by the film's success, its German distributor decided to commission the Austrian-born Edmund Meisel to write a score for the theatre orchestra. By the time of Eisenstein's arrival in Berlin, Meisel had reached the last reel in which the battleship, with the mutinous sailors on board, goes out to confront the Tsar's navy, tension mounting as the ships approach one another.
Eisenstein's advice to the composer was 'the music for this reel should be rhythm, rhythm and, before all else, rhythm.'
During the Odessa Steps sequence, against which the whole of cinema can be defined, the music reflects what Eisenstein called 'dialectical montage'.
Eisenstein's method is one of collision, conflict and contrast, with the emphasis on a dynamic juxtaposition of individual shots that forces the audience consciously to come to conclusions about the interplay of images while they are also emotionally and psychologically affected. The 80-minute The Battleship Potemkin contains 1,346 shots, whereas the average film around 1926 ran 90 minutes and had around 600 shots.
Curiously, the music was one of the aspects of the film considered to be subversive at the time. In some cities of Germany, the film was passed for screening but the music was forbidden. The Battleship Potemkin's depiction of a successful rebellion against political authority disturbed the world's censors.
The French, banning it for general showing, burned every copy they could find. It was only shown in film clubs in London, where it had been banned. Initially, in the USA, it was forbidden on the grounds that it 'gives American sailors a blueprint as to how to conduct a mutiny'. Likewise, in Germany, the War Ministry forbade members of the armed forces to see the film.
The German censors cut a scene when an officer is thrown into the water and a close-up of a brutal Cossack. A few years later, after Stalin came to power, a written introduction by Leon Trotsky was removed by the Soviets and replaced by a quote from Lenin. This latest version reinstated the original as well as some other intertitles felt too inflammatory at the time.
However, the one aspect of The Battleship Potemkin that has never aroused any censorship is Eisenstein's mischievous homoeroticism, which is more evident to modern audiences than ever.
Eisenstein was a self-confessed phallic obsessive. Knowing this, it is not unlikely that Eisenstein was slyly playing with the slowly rising guns as well as the scenes with sailors polishing pistons in a masturbatory manner.
There are also the fleeting shots of a young man tearing his shirt in fury to reveal his bare chest (a young monk has his shirt torn off him in Ivan The Terrible) and of two sailors obviously kissing as the cannons rise. None of this was lost on the sophisticated festival audience, who gave the performance (film plus orchestra) a standing ovation.
2005-02-14 Ye.Barabash. Interview with Catherine Deneuve ng.ru
2005-02-11 A.Daniel. Futility of humanitarian knowledge polit.ru
2005-02-09 A.Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky. Market's victory over art rg.ru
2005-02-05 Ilya Khrzhanovskiy's "4" gets main prize of the Rotterdam film festival grani.ru
2005-02-03 Science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem dies at 84 usatoday.com
02/03/2005. Izvestia. Interview with St.Lem
images.izvestia.ru images.usatoday.com
Stanislaw Lem, a popular science fiction writer whose novel Solaris was filmed twice, died Monday in his native Poland, his secretary said. He was 84.
Lem died in Krakow, Wojciech Zemek told The Associated Press. Zemek did not give other details or the cause of death, citing only Lem's advanced age.
Lem was one of the most popular science fiction authors of recent decades to write in a language other than English, and his works were translated from Polish into more than 40 other languages. His books have sold 27 million copies.
2005-02-03 Yu.Kuvaldin. 135 years of Fyodor Kryukov exlibris.ng.ru
2005-01-28 M.Trofimenkov. Aviator: Limited Myth Creation Forces kommersant.ru
2005-01-27 L.Kostyukov. Reading Dovlatov exlibris.ng.ru
2005-01-24 Hasan Nasreddinov. Mathematicians' Conspiracy Uncovered. Vigilant Society Appeals to Prosecutor's Office polit.ru
Leading world news agencies report that State Duma deputy and journalist Smyatkin, patriotic sculptor Reztsov and several other well-known public figures have proposed an initiative to ban all mathematical activities, associations and societies which offer financial support for mathematical research.
A special statement carried in the in-house newspaper 'Orthogonal Rus' stresses that contemporary mathematicians are the ones behind attempts to prove the superiority of Euclidian geometry.
The formal grounds for the appeal to the Prosecutor general, the Federal Revenue Service and the Audit Chamber, according to those behind the statement, were that all of the economic machinations, tax-avoidance, money-laundering and similar activity in selling and robbing the Motherland were carried out with help from mathematicians.
Signatories of the statement say they are basing their case on specially selected quotations from secret protocols of international mathematical congresses, as well as on a number of school maths textbooks they have examined.
Asked what aspect of the mathematicians' work had infuriated him, Reztsov said: "I checked everything by myself: in my sculptures parallel lines never cross and will never cross - however much the enemies of Russia want it. Besides, where there's maths, there's physics; where there's physics, there's chemistry, and if it wasn't for chemistry, no-one would be able to blow up my statue of the last rector of Moscow State University, who didn't accept contemporary mathematics."
One of the appeal's other authors, former KGB general turned TV evangelist Kastilov, commented on the situation thus: "All of this mathematics stuff only has a veneer of science. We all know about them. For this last work we had to listen to conversations that made our hair stand on end. All these book-lovers and Pharisees hate and despise us. They think they're so clever. Their real goal is to introduce their filthy mathematical faith to take the place of our sacred faith. It won't happen! We'll destroy them and restore the honourable name of our Russian Euclidian mathematics."
Vladimir Dokhodovsky, the director and security guard of the Diorama Research Centre and a well-known expert on such deviation, commented: "Journalist Smyatkina was seriously traumatised when they shut down his favourite programme, 'The Light of Perestroika.' All these years he’s been trying to find someone to blame for shutting it down. His first version was the fire brigade. This was the plan behind the programme 'Smoke of the Motherland'. Gradually his fixation switched from fire-fighters to mathematicians. Reztsov is sure that the bombing of his sculpture was carried out by international terrorists, backed by the global mathematical underground. Kastilov is certain that the collapse of the USSR and all of the problems that his own organs suffered were thoroughly worked out using contemporary mathematics. The others have similar stories - one was insulted in kindergarten by a future mathematician, another's mathematician girlfriend left him, yet another just has permanent indigestion. Our centre has been tracking them for some time now."
The deputy's faction colleagues reacted sympathetically to the initiative. Speaking on condition of anonymity in the lobby, one said: "You know, nothing surprises us any more. A month ago he suggested renaming our faction, from Motherland to Ogreland*. Important experts on Ukraine who had returned after their contracts to work for Yanukovich expired had convinced him that this was the best way to attract supporters there, because they'd think that our faction is made up of beautiful girls."
Officials at the Russian Mathematical Society had a good laugh, but refused to comment. Unofficially, though, they said: "Well, what do you expect?! The man's been bad at maths since childhood. We asked his school-teacher. She was really surprised that he knows which button to press during votes. Several others like him, offended by God - well, you have to feel sorry for them, find a doctor ... "
Officials at the Greek Consulate rushed to denounce the initiative. "Don't let them think they'll get paid 6 months internship on the Aegean Sea to study the legacy of Euclid out of it, that's the main thing," they said. "Such fans of ancient science visit Greece every summer, and without them we'd be like pigs in clover. He'd be better off defending the lost civilisations of the ancient Sahara."
Translation: gritpype - 07:49am Feb 10, 2005 GMT
Note:
* In the original - word play on the name of a left nationalist party Rodina - Urodina
2005-01-21 Ye.Kutlovskaya. Interview with Anna Mikhalkova ng.ru
2005-01-20 In Ivanovo, Lermontov considered a pornographer izvestia.ru
2005-01-14 I.Korneeva. Interview with Galina Vishnevskaya rg.ru
2005-01-08 A voice in the dark books.guardian.co.uk
Leonid Tsypkin. Summer in Baden-Baden amazon.com
endeavor.med.nyu.edu
Before she died last month, Susan Sontag hailed a literary masterpiece - smuggled out of Soviet Russia and finally rescued from obscurity after she found it in a second-hand bookshop in London.
Leonid Tsypkin was born in 1926 in Minsk of Russian-Jewish parents, both physicians. The medical specialty of his mother, Vera Polyak, was pulmonary tuberculosis. His father, Boris Tsypkin, was an orthopaedic surgeon, who was arrested at the start of the Great Terror, in 1934, on the usual fanciful charges and then released, through the intervention of an influential friend. . .
Boris Tsypkin, his wife, and 15-year-old Leonid owed their escape from the city to the chairman of a nearby collective farm, a grateful ex-patient, who ordered several barrels of pickles taken off a truck to accommodate the esteemed surgeon and his family.
A year later, Leonid Tsypkin began his medical studies, and when the war was over he returned with his parents to Minsk, where he graduated from medical school in 1947. In 1948, he married Natalya Michnikova, an economist. Mikhail, their only child, was born in 1950. By then, Stalin's anti-semitic campaign, launched the year before, was racking up victims, and Tsypkin hid among the staff of a rural psychiatric hospital.
In 1957, he was allowed to settle with his wife and son in Moscow, where he had been offered a post as a pathologist at the prestigious Institute for Poliomyelitis and Viral Encephalitis. He became part of the team that introduced the Sabin polio vaccine to the Soviet Union; his subsequent work at the institute reflected a variety of research interests, among them the response of tumour tissues to lethal viral infections and the biology and pathology of monkeys.
. . .in the early 1960s that Tsypkin began a more committed spate of writing: poems which were strongly influenced by Tsvetaeva and Pasternak - their photographs hung above his small work table. In September 1965, he decided to chance showing some of his lyrics to Andrei Sinyavsky, but Sinyavsky was arrested a few days before their appointment. Tsypkin and Sinyavsky, who was a year older, were never to meet, and Tsypkin became even more cautious.
Writing was engorging, isolating. "Monday through Friday," relates Mikhail Tsypkin, "my father left at a quarter to eight sharp for his work at the Institute of Poliomyelitis and Viral Encephalitis, which was situated in a distant suburb of Moscow, not far from the Vnukovo airport. He came back home at 6pm, had dinner, took a short nap, and sat down to write - if not his prose, then his medical research papers. Before going to bed, at 10pm, he sometimes took a walk. He usually spent his weekends writing as well. My father craved every opportunity to write, but writing was difficult, painful. He agonised over each word, and endlessly corrected his handwritten manuscripts.
In 1977, Mikhail Tsypkin and his wife, Elena, decided to apply for exit visas. Natalya Michnikova, fearing that her employment, for which a security clearance was needed, would prejudice her son's chances, resigned from her job in the division of the State Committee for Material and Technical Supplies (GOSSNAB) that allocated heavy road-building and construction equipment to practically all sectors of the Soviet economy, including the military. The visas were granted, and Mikhail and Elena Tsypkin left for the United States.
As soon as the KGB relayed this information to Sergei Drozdov, the director of the Institute for Poliomyelitis and Viral Encephalitis, Tsypkin was demoted to junior researcher - the position for someone without an advanced degree (he had two) and his starting rank of more than 20 years earlier. His salary, now the couple's only source of income, was cut by 75% . He continued to go to the institute every day but was excluded from laboratory research, which was always conducted by teams; not one of his colleagues was willing to work with Tsypkin, for fear of being tainted by contact with an "undesirable element". There would have been no point in seeking a research position elsewhere, since in every job application he would have had to declare that his son had emigrated.
In June 1979, Tsypkin, his wife, and his mother applied for exit visas. They then waited for almost two years. In April 1981, they were informed that their requests were "inexpedient" and had been denied. (Emigration from the USSR virtually stopped in 1980, when relations with the United States deteriorated as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; it became obvious that, for the time being, no favours from Washington would be forthcoming in exchange for permitting Soviet Jews to leave.)
It was during this period that Tsypkin wrote most of Summer in Baden-Baden. He started the book in 1977 and completed it in 1980. The writing was preceded by years of preparation: consulting archives and photographing places associated with Dostoyevsky's life as well as ones frequented by Dostoyevsky's characters during the seasons and at the times of day mentioned in the novels. (Tsypkin was a dedicated amateur photographer, and had owned a camera since the early 1950s.) After finishing Summer in Baden-Baden, he presented an album of these photographs to the Dostoyevsky museum in Leningrad.
However inconceivable it was that Summer in Baden-Baden could be published in Russia, there was still the option of publishing it abroad, as the best writers were then doing with their work. Tsypkin decided to attempt just this, and asked Azary Messerer, a journalist friend who had received permission to leave in early 1981, to smuggle a copy of the manuscript and some of the photographs out of the Soviet Union. Messerer was able to arrange this through the good offices of two American friends, a married couple, who were Moscow-based correspondents for UPI.
At the end of September, Tsypkin, his wife, and his mother reapplied for exit visas. On October 19, Vera Polyak died at the age of 86. The refusal of all three visa applications came a week later; this time, the decision had taken less than a month.
In early March 1982, Tsypkin went to see the head of the Moscow visa office, who told him, "Doctor, you will never be allowed to emigrate." On Monday, March 15, Drozdov informed Tsypkin that he would no longer be kept on at the institute. The same day, Mikhail Tsypkin, who was in graduate school at Harvard, called Moscow to announce that on Saturday his father had finally become a published writer. Messerer had succeeded in placing Summer in Baden-Baden with a Russian-émigré weekly in New York, Novaya Gazeta. The first instalment, illustrated by some of Tsypkin's photographs, had appeared on March 13.
Early on Saturday, March 20, his 56th birthday, Tsypkin sat down at his desk to continue work on the translation of a medical text from English into Russian - translating being one of the few possibilities of eking out a living open to refuseniks (Soviet citizens, usually Jews, who had been denied exit visas and fired from their jobs) - suddenly felt unwell (it was a heart attack), lay down, called out to his wife, and died. He had been a published author of fiction for exactly seven days.
2004-12-17 Tom Birchenough. Silent films from the early Soviet era are back in fashion, remastered and rescored for the 21st century context.themoscowtimes.com
Directors Kozintsev and Trauberg made "The Overcoat" in the atmosphere of experimentation of the 1920s
...it wasn't until Carmen Video released two new DVDs on its Drugoye Kino line that the fad for Soviet silent films finally hit home. Earlier this month, Drugoye Kino inaugurated a new label, Veliky Nemoi, with rescorings of two works from the 1920s, "The Overcoat" (Shinel) and "New Babylon" (Novy Vavilon), both co-directed by Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg.
Mila Rozanova, vice president for acquisitions at Drugoye Kino, makes no secret of the fact that local producers got their impetus from abroad. "The idea belongs to the Drugoye Kino team, and it's inspired by the latest international tendencies to give a live soundtrack to the silent films of the early cinema epoch," she said. "We thought it would be more original and fresh to ask new bands who have not done this before to arrange their live soundtracks. The quality of the product was higher than our expectations."
Backing the dramatic images of "The Overcoat" is the Moscow-based seven-piece band Inquisitorium, with a fusion of jazz, post-punk and industrial music. Musical accompaniment to the epic "New Babylon" comes courtesy of Altera Forma, an experimental band also hailing from Moscow.
Producers deliberately avoided the work of Eisenstein and other seminal directors of the 1920s, opting instead for the lesser-known revolutionary films of Kozintsev and Trauberg. "We have chosen unusual films, never released before in a version with a soundtrack," Rozanova said.
Three years after filming "The Overcoat," Kozintsev and Trauberg followed up with "New Babylon," which relates the revolutionary events of the Paris Commune of 1871. Filming partly in the French capital, Moskvin captured not only the city's landmarks, but its intimate life, from close-ups of cobblestones to the memorable faces of merchants and inhabitants.
shop.drugoe-kino.ru
2004-12-15 Putin visits Freindlikh at her house kremlin.ru
2004-12-13 Yevgeny Khaldey. Classic Soviet photos news.bbc.co.uk
2004-11-24 N.Dorozhkin. Evolution of Lilith - the first Eve ng.ru
2004-11-16 A.Kolesnikov. 30 years of Solzhenitsyn's "Under the rocks" grani.ru
2004-11-11 Ye.Kalashnikova. Poetry of Paul Celan exlibris.ng.ru
2004-11-08 Grandma DJ rocks Russian village news.bbc.co.uk
newsimg.bbc.co.uk
A 70-year-old Russian grandmother is taking a small village east of Moscow by storm.
Yuliya Ryabinina, the director of culture for Bolshiye Otary, has decided that discos are the best way to connect with local teenagers.
And she has taken it on herself to spin the discs.
Under the guise of DJ Baba Yuliya, Mrs Ryabinina holds regular dance parties at the village hall.
2004-11-05 N.Klimontovich. Three fat magazines gazeta.ru
2004-11-05 V.Rogova. Tsvetaeva and white movement ng.ru
2004-10-29 Yu.Bogomolov. Mikhalkov remains the chairman of the Russian Cinematographic Union grani.ru
grani.ru gazeta.ru
V.Nesterov. Mikhalkov's exorcist gazeta.ru
2004-10-27 A.Portnov. Was Homer blind? ng.ru
2004-10-27 I.Kulikov. Conspiracy against Snow White gazeta.ru
2004-10-27 Limonov's lyrics exlibris.ng.ru
2004-10-27 Mystery of Moscow metro dni.ru
This picture from metro Kievskaya dates back to 1954. It shows a man with something very similar to notebook and PDA.
dni.ru
2004-10-18 L.Shamina. Konchalovsky's Seagull izvestia.ru
2004-10-15 G.Anni. Exhibition of Soviet nu painting gazeta.ru
2004-10-12 Conference in Moscow: Russian Literature and Orthodoxal Faith kp.ru
2004-10-12 Conference on Russian Literature and Orthodoxal Faith regnum.ru
2004-10-07 Ye.Lesin. 3 volumes of Sinyavskiy's camp letters exlibris.ng.ru
2004-10-05 Lenfilm has complteted 4-part serial Brezhnev lenta.ru
2004-10-04 Director of Unversity of Culture detained for selling $550K worth of diplomas newsru.com
2004-10-01 20 men of Alla Pugacheva dni.ru
2004-10-01 Moscow Gallery Exhibits Butchered Bunnies, Cats mosnews.com
mosnews.com
Moscow’s Aidan Gallery is holding a controversial photo exhibit featuring the heads and body-parts of freshly killed rabbits and cats dressed up with decorative objects.
But photographer Natalia Edenmont, who was born in the former Soviet Union and resides in Sweden, does not use computer tricks to combine the bunnies’ heads with vases and cats with lace, like some of her other colleagues do. In her "Still Life" - nature morte in French which literally translates into "dead nature" - Edenmont uses real animals.
And the irony is that to make them look as lifelike as possible, the photographer cuts them up, and dresses them within 15 minutes of killing them.
"If you’re slow, then the pet’s eyes start getting glassy and they lose that fresh, lively look," the Novye Izvestia quoted Edenmont as saying.
Edenmont, who was born in Yalta in southern Ukraine, has seen a series of lawsuits in Sweden for her work. Despite protests from animal rights activists, however, the courts fail every time to find any crime in her work.
2004-10-01 Victor Rozov died smi.ru
2004-09-30 V.Savateev. 70 years of Ostrovsky's How the Steel was Tempred exlibris.ng.ru
2004-09-30 V.Shalevich: playing those on top ogoniok.com
2004-09-27 Vandals desecrate the monument to Catherine the Great in Saint-Petersburg lenta.ru
2004-09-25 S.Nekhamkin. Moles of history: what Izvestia wrote in 1964 izvestia.ru
2004-09-20 G.Anni. Sophie Loren gazeta.ru
2004-09-17 New romance of Oleg Tabakov dni.ru
2004-08-25 T.Rasskazova. 60 years of Sergei Solovyov ogoniok.com
imdb.com
vipcasino.ru
lenta.ru
2004-08-20 State Public Scientific-Technical Library GPNTB gets evicted from its building grani.ru
2004-08-19 S.Kaidash-Lakshina. How to get a piece of a Cherry Garden exlibris.ng.ru
NG. O.Kling The heavenly cherry garden
2004-08-13 A.Kostylev. "King Arthur": Saddam at King Arthur's court gazeta.ru
Keira Knightley as Guinevere
Clive Owen as Arthur ad Keira Knightle as Guinever
Battle scene
IMDB
2004-08-13 Andrew Osborn. Muscovites mourn the end of Brezhnev's 'revolting mastodon' news.independent.co.uk
One of Soviet Communism's most hideous architectural landmarks, the monolithic, 2,700-room Hotel Rossia in central Moscow, is to be torn down, almost 40 years after it first blotted the capital's Brezhnev-era skyline.
The largest hotel in the world when it opened in 1967 and still the biggest in Europe, the Rossia has been condemned by Moscow's demolition-minded Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. The Mayor, whose wife is a billionaire property magnate, believes the hotel is too unsightly to occupy its prime riverside site, a stone's throw from the Kremlin's red-brick walls and the undulating cobbles of Red Square.
The enormous building is to be replaced with "a multi-functional complex" including a new hotel with at least 2,000 rooms, extensive underground parking and various entertainments. A competition to come up with a design is open until October and demolition is expected soon afterwards.
2004-08-12 Ye.Shtal. V.Yerofeev: Moscow-Vladimir-Petushki exlibris.ng.ru
2004-08-10 Hotel "Russia" will be demolished vesti.ru
2004-08-07 M.Kotova, N.Kochetkova. 110 years of M.Zoschenko izvestia.ru
2004-08-02 Russian movies of WW1 period ng.ru
2004-07-28 Clement Crisp. Dance: Romeo and Juliet/Bolshoi news.ft.com
This Romeo is crass in its updating of the action to the present day, played against dreary, minimal scenery and dressed with all the wit of an episode of Big Brother (which, in its coarseness of behaviour, the staging oddly resembles).
This is yob culture, pandering to the lowest common denominator of theatrical understanding, wholly selfish in tinkering with dramatic scheme and music in quest of yet shoddier tricks.
Among its sins let me note its lack of emotional resonance: Juliet has become a hoyden, much given to those flexed-foot poses, those limb-twisting agonies, that are the stock in trade of Eurotrash dance.
The entire affair is resolutely choreographed off-point. Romeo is a wimp, flailing about on the stage like a landed salmon. Mercutio seems sexually ambivalent and appears at the Capulet ball in drag. The action implicit in the score (let alone in Shakespeare) is cursorily examined.
There are a few admirable moments, as when Mercutio smears blood from his wounds on to Romeo's face, baptising him to vengeance, and when, as the bedroom scene ends, Romeo leaves, trailing a bed-sheet, and Juliet holds it as a last memory of her lover.
2004-07-26 Russian linguist A.N.Baranov on Kirkorov's cursing regnum.ru
Kirkorov apologizes
Will Kirkorov leave show business? izvestia.ru
Kirkorov found guilty of harassment vesti.ru
Pop singer Kirkorov curses journalist Irina Aroyan
Kirkorov vs Aroyan: before the trial
Baranov does not matter regnum.ru
Kirkorov's language games and expert Baranov regnum.ru
Kirkorov fights for his cursing rights utro.ru
Ye.Stroiteleva, R.Kirillov. Russian linguists assess Kirkorov's cursing izvestia.ru
2004-07-16 Aitmatov suffers from heart attack lenta.ru
2004-07-12 Yu.Bogomolov. My stepbrother Frankenstein by V.Todorovsky grani.ru
2004-07-11 A.Kondrashov. Bartkov starts shooting "Master and Margarita" serial vesti7.ru
2004-06-29 Andrew Osborn. St Petersburg, the 'Venice of the North', gets its own fleet of gondolas news.independent.co.uk
St Petersburg's sumptuous palace-lined waterways and its ornate Italianate architecture have long prompted visitors to dub the former Russian capital "the Venice of the North". But until now the city's canals were bereft of that quintessential Venetian form of transport: the gondola.
An enterprising St Petersburg lawyer has changed all that, however, by introducing Venice's "black swans" to the city's majestic waterways for the first time since the Russian city was founded by the iron-willed Tsar Peter the Great in 1703.
Alexander Smirnov, head of Venetsia Nord (Venice of the North), is starting small. The city of some five million inhabitants has just six gondolas so far, against Venice's five hundred plus, but more are expected to follow if the vessels prove popular with tourists.
"It will be great if the black swans of Venice go along the canals of St Petersburg," Mr Smirnov enthused to the local St Petersburg Times. "The trip costs what it costs in Venice, not more, not less." That, according to his firm, is about €10 (£6.50) for approximately one hour of romantic paddling.
Mr Smirnov says the boats have been modelled on their Venetian counterparts and, although they are produced in St Petersburg, he claims they are authentic "down to the last detail".
2004-06-25 Linguist Valdimir Gak dies grani.ru
2004-06-23 M.Ardov. 115 years of Anna Akhmatova exlibris.ng.ru
2004-06-21 The Tikhvin Icon of Holy Mother returns to Russia 1tv.ru
2004-06-20 SETH MYDANS. Where Chess Is King and the People Are the Pawns nytimes.com
Back in the days of the Silk Road caravans, this is what people might have called a mirage - a huge glass dome, surrounded by a California-style housing development, rising from the parched brown steppe.
That shimmering vision has been brought to life here in Elista, the capital of the Russian republic of Kalmykia, a monument to the power of ego over nature, not to mention common sense and even reason. Its name is Chess City.
Like a glassed-in Biosphere on Mars, the four-story dome encloses a cool, fresh world of carpets and comfort, of whispers and intense concentration, where the most brilliant minds of chess compete for diamond crowns.
For miles around - in fact for almost all the rest of Kalmykia - 300,000 people live in poverty on the barren plains, where tank trucks deliver drinking water and where dried sheep dung, hoarded through the summer, fuels stoves in winter.
Kalmykia, a remote region on the northwest coast of the Caspian Sea, has few natural resources. Its economy crumpled with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the withdrawal of its patrons and investors in Moscow.
What is left - both inside and outside Chess City - belongs to President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the republic's whimsical strongman and, in a forking move, the respected leader of the World Chess Federation, known as FIDE, for its acronym in French.
2004-06-19 Erotic chess exhibited in Samara samara.kp.ru
2004-06-18 New Palekh Bible 1tv.ru
2004-06-18 S.Shargunov. Gorkiy and his granddaughters ng.ru
2004-06-17 Yu.Kachalkina. On Mandestam exlibris.ng.ru
2004-06-17 Yu.Kuvaldin. 10 years of Nagibin's death exlibris.ng.ru
2004-06-03 Olga Bakushinskaya. M.Bulgakov, his wife and their lovers kp.ru
2004-05-24 Writer and leader. Sholokhov and Stalin 1tv.ru
2004-05-22 I died as a kid - film about Paradzhanov strana.ru
2004-05-21 Anna Arhangelskaya. Was King Arthur Ukrainian? utro.ru
2004-05-20 Eisenstein's erotic drawings gazeta.ru
2004-04-24 Nika goes to The Return grani.ru
2004-04-22 Russian human rights bureau may sue Mel Gibson news.izvestia.ru
2004-04-05 Mark Ames. Lost In Translation. Sofia's A Bad Choice exile.ru
First, let me give you a quick synopsis. Bill Murray plays an aging, alienated actor who comes to Japan to get away from his wife and empty life in America. He doesn't like people much and he's always amused by the Japanese's strange and inscrutable ways. Meanwhile, in the same five-star hotel where Murray is suffering from his ain't-it-lonely-at-the-top pain, curvaceous uber-babe Scarlett Johansson, who is quite possibly the biggest on-screen fox since Uma Thurman in Dangerous Lesions, is also suffering from the pain and alienation of being rich, elite and lonely. Yeah, I know, there are people out there suffering from poverty, disease, death, war, and all that hoity-toity gee-aren't-you-lucky-you're-suffering stuff. But imagine REAL pain and suffering, that of being beautiful, famous, in a 5-star hotel in Tokyo and feeling estranged from your spouse. Brrrr! Just the thought of it fills me with an empty, dark longing.
2004-03-14 Fire Destroys Russia's Historic Manezh Hall english.peopledaily.com.cn
utro.ru
An enormous fire engulfed the Central Manezh Exhibition Hall near Red Square on Sunday night, destroying one of Moscow's most precious historical buildings and raising fears that it might spread to the Kremlin.
Some 60 fire trucks were battling the fire at 11:30 p.m., as flames leapt 30 meters above the building, lighting up the night sky and sending a red glow across the Kremlin.
NTV television reported that firefighters were struggling to stop the fire from spreading to the Kremlin. But Sergei Devyatov, spokesman for the Federal Guard Service, said there was little risk of that happening.
The fire -- ranked a five, the most serious category -- was the apparent result of a short circuit, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.
2004-02-19 Block's library is on fire lenta.ru
2004-02-17 Andreo Khrzhanovsky: Anna Akhmatova called Brodsky "cat and a half" izvestia.ru
2004-01-02 Vadim Prokhorov. The prodigy guardian.co.uk
image.guardian.co.uk
Two hours into our conversation, Evgeny Kissin, sitting in his apartment on New York's Upper West Side, becomes somewhat restless and asks how many questions I still have for him. "Not many, really," I reply. "The reason for my asking," he continues, "is that our building has a new regulation: we are prohibited to practice after 9pm, and it's already seven o'clock."
At the Gnesin School, he entered the class of Anna Pavlovna Kantor - the only piano teacher he has ever had. "For as long as I can remember," says Kissin, "I was more interested in music than spending time outside with other children. It was an urge that neither I nor anyone else could stop. Perhaps some would think that my childhood wasn't really normal. But for me it was as natural and normal as breathing."
His first performance was at the age of seven, when he played his own compositions. He was 10 when he played his first concert with an orchestra; at 12 he played Chopin's concertos with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra and Dmitry Kitaenko at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. This famous concert was one of the most important and memorable points in the pianist's career. He was virtually unknown until that evening; he woke up the next morning as a legend.
At first, Kissin was allowed to travel only to eastern Europe. On his first trip, he played in a gala concert in east Berlin. After the concert, Erich Honecker, East Germany's Communist leader, said that if hadn't been for Kissin, the gala would have been a total waste of time.
In 1988, he met Herbert von Karajan and with him played the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto.
Kissin remembers every minute detail of the meeting and the extraordinary effect Karajan made on him: "Anna Pavlovna told me that I had never played Chopin's Fantasy as well as I did for Karajan." The effect was obviously mutual. "When I finished playing," remembers Kissin, "I looked at Karajan, got up, made a few steps toward him and saw him giving me an air kiss, then taking his sunglasses off and wiping his tears with a handkerchief." Karajan's wife said to Kissin after the meeting: "I have been married to him for 30 years and have never seen him so moved." While saying goodbye to Kissin's mother, Karajan pointed at the 16-year-old pianist and said: "Genius."
They all moved to New York just after the 1991 revolution in Russia. It was an extremely turbulent, volatile and uncertain time in Russia; the country was disintegrating and what was coming in its place was unclear. "So we decided to wait it out," explains Kissin, "to see how all the turmoil would end. And since my tour at that time included the US, we decided to stay there. We also thought about the UK. Now we live in both New York and London."
Kissin plays around 40 concerts a year, which is one possible explanation for the fact that he never seems to tire of playing the piano. Despite being interested in many things he has no specific hobbies. "My art is my life," he stresses. "One is inseparably related to the other. To realise the potential given me by nature is, perhaps, most important for me, and my potential is in music."
2003-12-25 Marina Sletova, Nikita Vladimirsy. Batum, Margarita. exlibris.ng.ru
2003-12-04 Natalia Belevtseva. Tyutchev's 200 years exlibris.ng.ru
2003-11-17 Philip Glass and his ensemble go to Russia grani.ru
2003-11-12 I.Milstein. 85 years of A.Solzhenitsyn grani.ru
2003-10-08 A.Solzhenitsyn. They don't look for the light in the twilight lgz.ru
2003-10-01 E.Guseinov. The Neanderthal genocide inauka.ru
2003-09-07 Russian film wins Golden Lion news.bbc.co.uk
newsimg.bbc.co.uk
A father-and-son drama by first-time Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev called Vozvrashchenie (The Return) has won the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival.
The film tells the story of two adolescent boys who are subjected to a harsh regime when their strict father returns after a 10-year absence.
But there was real-life tragedy shortly after filming ended when one of its stars, 15-year-old actor Vladimir Girin, drowned in the lake where some scenes were set.
The runner-up Grand Prix Silver Lion went to Lebanese-born Randa Chahal Sabbag's The Kite - a film about love and separation on the Lebanese-Israeli border.
Japanese director Takeshi Kitano won best director for Zatoichi, about a blind swordsman in 19th Century Japan.
2003-09-05 Kir Bulichev died grani.ru
2003-06-18 Theater in the center of Moscow is on fire grani.ru
2003-06-14 MICHAEL WINES. Sculpting Soviet Giants, Watching Them Fall nytimes.com
Lenin "was in my head and in my heart. He required more and more artistic content." LEV KERBEL: graphics7.nytimes.com Among the many distinctions he has racked up in his 85 years - hero of Socialist labor, Goethe Prize laureate, winner of the Lenin Prize - there is one that Lev Kerbel would just as well forget: excepting perhaps Saddam Hussein's sculptor, it is doubtful that any other living artist has seen as many of his or her works wrecked by mobs. "Brezhnev ordered 10 Lenins like this, and whenever he went somewhere, he would give one away," Mr. Kerbel, a thin, wispy-haired man with a lively wit and animation, said during a long chat in his Moscow studio this month. He waved toward one of his favorite Lenins, a hand-in-overcoat model first raised in his adopted hometown of Smolensk. "He paid well, too - 200 rubles each!" he said, then laughed. At the time, 200 rubles was worth as little as $20 on the black market. Mr. Kerbel sculpted many Marxes and Lenins, including the most celebrated ones: the Lenin in Moscow's Oktyabrsky Square and a huge head of Marx in Germany. He turned out dozens of Yuri Gagarins, the first man in space, and countless paeans to World War II sacrifice and Soviet labor. He sculpted a Castro bust and, just once, Stalin - a death mask, as he lay in his Kremlin bier. He says he is fixated by Lenin, and his best works - Lenin in a peasant's cap, Lenin with a woman - bear scant resemblance to the wooden icon, right arm lifted toward tomorrow, found in most Russian town squares. Mr. Kerbel's remarkable life began on Nov. 7, 1917 - Oct. 25 in the old-style Russian calendar... At the time, Mr. Kerbel's mother was in a barrel, hiding from a pogrom against local Jews. ..."I was born in that barrel. Thank God, I started crying after the gangsters left."
2003-05-25 Hedgehog in the fog - best animation ever newsru.com
2003-04-06 Ye. Barabash. Interview with A. Wajda ng.ru
2003-04-05 Nicholas Lezard. Echoes from Chechen guerrillas books.guardian.co.uk
Hadji Murat was Tolstoy's last substantial work: yet he knew, as he completed it, that it would never be published in his lifetime. It is a work based on the facts of the life and death of the eponymous Chechen separatist guerrilla, who terrorised the Russian army in the mid-19th century but surrendered himself to the tsar's forces after falling out with his own commander.
Two things are particularly striking about this story. The first is Tolstoy's admiration for the man. This is actually a matter of historical record: Hadji Murat was not only courageous and resourceful, but honourable and decent, and Tolstoy does not stint in his praise or affection. Against him is set the vanity, pomposity, lechery and ignorance of Tsar Nicholas I. After sleeping with a young girl at a masquerade, the tsar is described by Tolstoy thus: "But despite the fact that he was certain he had behaved as he should, a certain unpleasant aftertaste remained with him and, in order to stifle this feeling, he began thinking about the thing that always reassured him: what a great man he was." Incidentally, Nicholas II, his great-grandson, was very fond of the book, for all the good it did him.
The most striking thing about the story is, as the blurb quite justifiably puts it, its "incredible resonance with current affairs". The Chechens here are Muslims, and their asceticism and piety are strongly contrasted with the moral flabbiness of the Russians; yet, for all that, the way that Tolstoy and even his semi-fictionalised compatriots deal with the Chechens contrasts strongly, and not to our favour, with the way our own modern adversaries are so childishly demonised. Of course, Russian policy was just as brutal then as anyone else's is now; and one might profitably reflect on the effect the troops' raids on civilian villages have in chapter 17. It is a chilling warning that echoes loud and clear down the years. Literature, as Pound said, is news that stays news. I can't at the moment think of a better illustration of this than Hadji Murat .
2003-03-11 Nathaniel Hoopes. To know Russia, know its classic novels csmonitor.com
Dr. Caryl Emerson, professor of Slavic languages and literature: www.csmonitor.com
Caryl Emerson has made more than 40 trips to Russia and Eastern Europe, most of them under cold war conditions. A professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Princeton University, Dr. Emerson teaches courses on 19th-century Russian novels, including Alexander Pushkin's classic in verse, "Eugene Onegin"; Leo Tolstoy's epic, "War and Peace"; and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's psychological thriller, "Crime and Punishment."
Although her small department attracts only a few majors every year, Emerson has forged a reputation as one of the university's most compelling lecturers, and her classes attract students from a variety of disciplines.
Throughout her career, which has spanned nearly four decades, teaching undergraduates has remained Emerson's true passion. She subtly weaves profound philosophical thinking into each of her lectures, and sparks lively debate in small-group discussions.
Excerpts from her recent conversation with the Monitor follow.
I went on a trip to the Soviet Union with my grandmother in 1956. That was three years after Stalin died, and it was a very gray and scary country at the time.
We were carefully watched, and this was very exciting to me because I was the sort of adolescent who felt that America had too many freedoms, and that we were taking most of them for granted. I felt that studying a country that was politically unfree gave me a better - and less voyeuristic - position as a student of it.
Then in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, when I was teaching and taking groups overseas, we really could do valuable things for the -Russian- culture: take documents out of the country, establish contacts with writers and dissident groups.
It was dangerous, but also exciting. I was fascinated by some of the hardships there.
Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy don't require any particular training to understand.
In fact, if you asked any great writer or poet whether they wanted to be taught via lecture classes, assignments, and secondary literature, they would say 'No, just read me again, don't read about me.'
Especially in Russia, the great artist of the 19th century was supposed to directly contact the reader.
The country simply doesn't have a literature outside her history, and the literature is a great deal more than entertainment.
The Russians are a very philosophical people. This has been deeply ingrained in them, which is one of the reasons the Communists were able to tap such genuine enthusiasm.
Whether they were always that way and thus produced Dostoyevsky, or they read Dostoyevsky and became that way, it's hard to know. Great writers -whose works- become classics in their own culture are both a product of and a contribution to those stereotypes.
The Russians really believe in reading their literature and taking their identity from it. So while it would be hard to find an "American" text that we could all agree was "American," it's not hard to find a Russian text. Start with Pushkin and end with Dostoyevsky and you can combine them and form an identity.
As Solzhenitsyn said in 1991, when the Iron Curtain began to rise, all the slop from the West flowed in first. This is the problem with the free world: The things it most easily exports are its least valuable aspects - junk food, junk pulp literature, junk values.
There are excellent values in the West, like liberal democracy, but those are the product of a thousand years of integral development on the soil of Western countries. They don't import. The whole problem with liberalism is that it doesn't happen quickly. Well, McDonald's and pornography happen quickly.
2003-02-20 Explosion destroys Krylov's archives lenta.ru
Explosion in The Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin's House) destroys Krylov's archives. Employees of the Pushkin's House tried to conceal the event that happened as early as Jan. 17.
2003-02-11 Victor Loshak. Russians? Jews? Russian Jews? mn.ru
A. Solzhenitsyn: www.mn.ru
2003-02-06 Politicians narrate Peter and the Wolf news.bbc.co.uk
Former world leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton are to help narrate a new recording of Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.
The last leader of the Soviet Union will join the former US president in a recorded performance of the work by the Russian National Opera.
The performance will be under the command of Grammy-winning conductor Kent Nagano.
"We chose former politicians who have a great ability to communicate," said Nagano.
The three will help perform Prokofiev's tale as well as a new piece - The Wolf and Peter - which tells the tale from the wolf's point of view.
"We thought it would be interesting to see the story from the point of view of the wolf," Nagano added.
"He's in the forest but the forest is disappearing, urbanisation is cutting the trees away... and we see why the wolf is so desperate."
2003-02-05 Nikolay Rudensky. One more book by Alexander Isaevich grani.ru
2003-01-23 Nick Paton Walsh. The devil and Yuri Luzhkov guardian.co.uk
It is one of the intelligentsia's quiet prides, a leafy enclave embracing a tranquil pond which still looks today much as it did in the 20s when Mikhail Bulgakov wrote his satirical masterpiece Master and Margarita.
Patriarch's Pond is the place in the novel where the Devil appeared to wreak havoc in Stalin's Moscow. It remains popular with the arts elite but the devil about to wreak havoc with the Russian heritage is not Bulgakov's Dr Woland but Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov.
To the disbelief and despair of a band of conservationists and architects, he wants to "adorn" it with outsize sculptures illustrating the novel: a statue of Jesus mockingly walking across the water, a primus stove, a park bench.
The artist's drawings have all the subtlety of that other machine the mayor is often associated with: the bulldozer.
Trees will be uprooted for a statue of Bulgakov on the huge park bench. In front of him 12 pillars will seem to hold the figure of Christ centimetres above the water. Across the pond will sit the stove, the book's symbol of evil spirits.
It will cost more than 3m, a lot for a city which can barely afford to keep its homeless from freezing to death in winter. But the damage to the religious and cultural heritage will be far greater, its opponents argue.
Alexei Klimenko, a renowned architectural critic, said: "the Patriarch's Pond is one of the symbols of Moscow, a quiet enclave where thousands of Muscovites come to relax. How can one put this monstrous stove there?"
The church is furious about the proximity of Christ and Bulgakov's statues.
Father Mikhail Dudko, secretary of the Russian Orthodox church commission on church and society, said: "A person reading Bulgakov's novel can see the Gospel, but not from Matthew, or John's -perspective-, but through the eyes of Dr Woland - the author's incarnation of the devil."
The plan to depict scenes from the lives of the novel's evil spirits on the inside walls of the primus stove "can be seen as making advances towards evil spirits".
The church is furious about the proximity of Christ and Bulgakov's statues.
Father Mikhail Dudko, secretary of the Russian Orthodox church commission on church and society, said: "A person reading Bulgakov's novel can see the Gospel, but not from Matthew, or John's -perspective-, but through the eyes of Dr Woland - the author's incarnation of the devil."
The plan to depict scenes from the lives of the novel's evil spirits on the inside walls of the primus stove "can be seen as making advances towards evil spirits".
The new plan, by the general architect of Moscow, Alexander Kuzmin, has provoked a petition with 1,000 signatures.
Natalya Tchernyetsova, who lives locally, said: "We tried to hold a protest but the police came immediately to remove us. We have little hope of winning in a Moscow court, as they are all under the administration's pressure and control.
"They are trying to convince us that this will improve the environment, but they have just cut down a lime tree that was over 100 years old."
2003-01-08 80 years since Hashek's death utro.ru
2002-12-08 DIRK OLIN. Tchaikovsky nytimes.com
Poll: Is Tchaikovsky overrated or underrated?
Tchaikovsky's ''Nutcracker'' will be performed on stages from small towns to the New York City Ballet this month -- and in ''literally hundreds of productions around the world,'' according to Jeffrey Milarsky, music director and conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra. That, along with the ''1812 Overture,'' ''Swan Lake'' and certain other works, means that Tchaikovsky, as Milarsky says, ''is played more than any composer.'' Yet where Milarsky and other members of the classical music establishment herald a revival of esteem for Tchaikovsky during recent years, Milton Babbitt, 86, a giant of the serialism movement in modern composing, has a problem with him. ''He said Brahms was an untalented bastard -- that's a quote,'' Babbitt says. ''But I've learned a lot from Brahms, whereas I can't say that about Tchaikovsky.'' Richard Einhorn, 50, whose compositions have been performed from Lincoln Center to the Netherlands, makes even less effort to disguise his antipathy: ''Tchaikovsky has as much to do with real classical music as the Three Tenors have to do with real opera.
The man certainly was, and it was an open secret in Russian society, particularly after an unconsummated marriage whose failure was relatively well known. But can we really hear Tchaikovsky's sexual orientation in his composition? ''Of course,'' says Joseph Kraus, professor of music theory at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. ''There is no completely right or wrong way to listen to any music. And if our interest in his homosexuality forms part of the filter through which we listen, then it would seem that an investigation into this area would be appropriate.'' Kraus has written most pointedly about Tchaikovsky's ''Symphony 'Manfred''' -- which some consider his first significant work after a seven-year creative slump following the disastrous nuptials -- as a kind of musical ''coming out'' process.
In his own day, when nationalistic sensibilities were ascendant, many countrymen savaged Tchaikovsky for being too stylistically cosmopolitan, ''looking to the West while so many other Russians were turning eastward,'' according to Leon Botstein, a conductor, musicologist and president of Bard College. ''Despite the resistance, though, he would become common ground between the two schools.''
After his death in 1893, Tchaikovsky increasingly came under attack from modernists who found him full of fluff and bombast. Although Igor Stravinsky resuscitated Tchaikovsky's reputation, most modernists still had scant regard for him well into the latter half of the 20th century.
Tchaikovsky himself copped to a fundamental inability to master some compositional forms. With much of modern composition prizing rigorous formality, even atonality, the whimsy and melodic emphasis of Tchaikovsky was bound to take some hits. As Babbitt puts it: ''It is often said that his music lacks the structure of textbook form. His pieces are mostly studied as orchestral niceties. That's all.''
''Today, there is a continuing modernist group that takes issue with him as a composer who they say can't command a grammar of music composition that transcends the imposition of a story line,'' Botstein says. ''But most of this is snobbery. All great art is complex, even when it appears simple.''
Recent studies suggest that, given Russian social attitudes, sexual mores and criminal practice in the late 19th century, as well as Tchaikovsky's elevated social standing and the generally sympathetic attitude toward homosexuality in court circles and the imperial family, any scandal or repression involving the composer was most improbable.
2002-11-21 Richard Pipes. SOLZHENITSYN AND THE JEWS, REVISTED. Alone Together tnr.com
Recently Alexander Solzhenitsyn published a long book called Dvesti let vmeste, or Two Hundred Years Together, the first of two volumes devoted to the history of Jews in Russia from the third partition of Poland in 1795, when Russia, until then effectively without Jews, suddenly acquired one million Jewish subjects. It covers the years between 1795 and 1916. The follow-up volume will bring the story up to the year 1995.
Someone familiar with Solzhenitsyn's treatment of Jews in his historical novels cannot escape the feeling that, at least in some measure, this undertaking is an effort to rid the author of the reputation for anti-Semitism. Although Solzhenitsyn has always indignantly rejected this accusation, it was not entirely unmerited. In Lenin in Zurich, he depicted the Russian Jew Alexander Parvus-Helphand as a slimy, sinister, almost satanic figure as he attempted to hire the exile Lenin to work for the Germans. In The Red Wheel, when dealing with the assassination of his hero Peter Stolypin by Dmitry Bogrov (whom he named "Mordka" or Mordechai, lest anyone miss his nationality), Solzhenitsyn attributed to the assassin, without any historical warrant, a desire to prevent Stolypin from reforming Russia, since what was good for Russia was bad for the Jews. In fact, Bogrov came from a thoroughly assimilated family--his grandfather was a convert and his father a member of the Kievan Nobles' Club--and he had no Jewish interests in mind.
Solzhenitsyn's new book (which is not yet available in English) helps to clarify the writer's attitude toward Jews. He draws a sharp distinction between religious Jews and assimilated Jews, notably those assimilated Jews who joined the revolutionary movement. For the former he has admiration that verges on mystical reverence. ...He also respects Zionists and expresses esteem for Israel. But his attitude toward assimilated Jews is ambivalent, and he seems uncertain about whether or not they contributed to Russia's well-being.
To his credit, he disposes of the canard, widespread in late czarist Russia, that the Jews exploited the peasants. He cites the historian I. Orshanskii to the effect that Jewish traders opened markets for peasants by transforming articles of consumption into commodities, in this manner enriching the peasantry. The historical evidence indeed indicates that Russian peasants fared better in the regions populated by Jews--that is, the so-called Pale of Settlement--than in other parts of the empire where legal residence was forbidden to Jews.
Solzhenitsyn reserves his hostility for those assimilated Jews who, from the 1860s onward, in large numbers joined the revolutionary movement. He cites name after name, and he conveys the impression that Jews supplied the leadership as well as the rank and file of this movement, adding naively that his stress on Jewish radicals "does not mean, of course, that there were not many and important revolutionaries among the Russians."
The subject is very complicated. Although Jews, especially converts, did play a significant part in radical subversion, the ranks of the revolutionaries were certainly dominated by Russians. At one point Solzhenitsyn asserts quite wrongly (citing a Jewish writer) that Jews imported Marxism to Russia. In reality, this was the work of Russians such as George Plekhanov, who organized in Switzerland Russia's first Marxist party, and Peter Struve, who popularized Marx's ideas inside the country.
So what are we to make of all this? Only that, as Solzhenitsyn likes to stress, Jews are a highly dynamic nation: as such, they are over-represented in most fields of endeavor in which they participate.
To be fair, for all his emphasis on their participation in radical ranks, Solzhenitsyn absolves Jews of responsibility for the revolution: "No, in no way can it be said that Jews 'made' the revolution of 1905 or 1917 as it was not made by another nation taken as a whole."
What Solzhenitsyn almost entirely misses is the poisonous atmosphere that was created by anti-Semitic propaganda emanating from the Orthodox church and nationalist circles.
Still, Solzhenitsyn properly exonerates the czarist government from responsibility for the terrible pogroms of the 1880s and the early 1900s. Hearsay notwithstanding, no evidence has come to light that the government instigated violence against Jews, let alone organized it. In not doing so, it acted in its own interest, for it realized that riots against Jews could readily turn first against Christian landlords and then against its own officialdom. As he points out, the socialists/ revolutionaries of the People's Will welcomed the pogroms for the same reason, seeing in them a manifestation of "class consciousness." He himself interprets the pogroms as spontaneous outbursts, which he blames, rather vaguely, on the "tragic quality" of Russians and Ukrainians, "in moments of anger, to succumb to blind passion ... unable to distinguish the guilty from the innocent."
The source base of Solzhenitsyn's book is thin. He relies heavily on a few secondary works, such as the sixteen-volume Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia, or Jewish Encyclopedia, that was published on the eve of World War I, and Iurii Gessen's standard two-volume Istoriia evreiskogo naroda v Rossii, or History of the Jewish People in Russia, published in 1925 and 1927. Ignorance of foreign languages has placed beyond Solzhenitsyn's reach the rich literature on his subject in English, German, and French (not to mention Hebrew). These lacunae, combined with his forceful interventions at each stage of the narrative, make his history something more than a personal statement yet less than a work of scholarship.
Still, Solzhenitsyn's book is a notable achievement in its attempt to place the "problem" of Russian Jewry in political and social perspective, and one that does credit to its author's reputation.
2002-11-11 Oliver Bullough. Tanya Grotter: a Harry Potter Parody? reuters.com
They have so much in common: both are orphans, have strange marks on their faces, wield magical powers and battle an enemy too terrible to be named.
But uncannily parallel lives have not made Harry Potter and Russian literary sensation Tanya Grotter friends -- far from it. Potter's publishers say Grotter's creator, Dmitry Yemets, is copying the British wizard and are considering legal action.
Not so, says Yemets.
"It's not plagiarism, it's a parody, I'm putting the ideas into a Russian context," he told Reuters.
On the face of it, the two books are very similar. The covers feature the same spiky print, and their heroes flying.
"We had to use the same type-face to show people what I was parodying," Yemets said, speaking after a book-signing.
The plots are also hard to distinguish at first glance.
Grotter and Potter both lose their parents in a battle with a wizard turned bad, who they go on to confront in battle: Potter fights Voldemort, Grotter takes on Chuma-Del-Tort.
Both go to a school for wizards: Potter to Hogwarts, Grotter to Tibidokhs.
"I want to show that Russian literature, like English literature, is in the right state to create a world bestseller," Yemets said.
But young readers had no doubts about which ranked higher in their affections.
"They are similar, but Tanya Grotter is better, it's more fun. And a girl is a better main character, because she's more like me," said Sasha, nine.
Alexander, also nine, said Tanya Grotter was better because it was Russian.
"Tanya is a proper Russian name, for one thing, not like Harry. Although Grotter is not a Russian surname, I don't know where that comes from," he said.
As children crowded forwards to have Tanya Grotter books signed, Yemets said he would give a prize to the first to tell the main distinction between Tanya Grotter and Harry Potter.
Nine-year-old Alexander's hand shot up. "There is no difference, they're basically exactly the same," he said.
2002-10-29 Ilya Milstein. A SHADOW OF IVAN DENISOVICH newtimes.ru
The author Vladimir VOINOVICH has written a book about Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He granted his last interview on this subject to our correspondent Ilya Milstein.
Vladimir Voinovich's book A Portrait Against the Background of the Myth has evoked much interest among the reading public and is a source of controversy in literary circles. Sympathy and anger have been voiced. Like the bitter complaint of the editor of a well-known daily in Moscow that the author of Chonkin "is destroying authoritative people" and may find himself under the ruins of the demolished monument.
2002-10-15 Daniel Utrilla. Lie about K-19 inosmi.ru
Why "widow maker"? - We were not married!
2002-10-15 GRU officer charged for working on TV kp.ru
2002-09-02 MEL GUSSOW. In the World of Chekhov, Where `Complexity Is a Synonym for Truth' nytimes.com
Anton Chekhov was that rare writer who made an equally brilliant contribution to both theater and fiction. In that regard he was perhaps matched only by Samuel Beckett. With each, one art fortifies the other, and the result is an indivisible body of work.
In "If Only We Could Know!," Vladimir Kataev, an author and professor of Russian literature at Moscow University, deals with Chekhov the complete artist. Through close textual analysis of all the major plays (including early versions and notations about works in progress) and many of the stories, he moves thoughtfully through the life so that we can see the reiteration of themes, the emergence of the writer-thinker and the evolution of the art and the artist.
For Mr. Kataev one turning point for Chekhov was the period he spent in Sakhalin. His visit to that prison island in 1890 led to his belief in collective guilt and responsibility and it is from that position that he wrote his four theatrical masterworks and some of his greatest stories. In them he studiously refrained from allowing his characters to blame others for their own failures. For example, Vanya (in "Uncle Vanya") assails the professor for ruining his life, when the truth is that Vanya has acted as his own enemy, having duped himself about the professor's genius.
Mr. Kataev's Chekhov is an intuitive artist with penetrating insights into human nature and "the nature of illusion, delusion and false opinion." In Chekhov's world, there are multiple perspectives, and "complexity is a synonym for truth."
At the root of Mr. Kataev's analysis is the path from "it seemed" to "it turned out that," phrases that appear with great frequency in Chekhov's work and in this book. A character will begin by saying that something "seems" to be so, but by the end of the story or play it will have "turned out" differently than expected. This transformation provides the dramatic arc that sets up conflict and collision, and that can lead to resolution, in Chekhov's case a kind of purposeful irresolution. "In Chekhov's endings," Mr. Kataev says, "there is no revelation and no enlightenment, only a discovery." As Olga says in "The Three Sisters" in the line that gives this book its title, "If only we could know!"
In the end -of "The Seagull" -, Nina inflicts three "pitiless blows" on Konstantin: scorning his love, acknowledging her continuing passion for Trigorin and reminding him of his play, which was at the root of his misfortunes. As a result of this rejection, Konstantin's suicide echoes with inevitability.
In the last chapter Mr. Kataev offers a fresh interpretation of "The Cherry Orchard," affirming Lopakhin's place at the center of the play and noting the author's warning to directors and actors not to trivialize the character. When Lopakhin, the bourgeois landowner, is described as having "the soul of an artist," sometimes that line is greeted with disbelief by theatergoers. Mr. Kataev suggests that Lopakhin is not a vulgarian and certainly not a buffoon (as he is sometimes portrayed) but a businessman-artist in common with Russian entrepreneurs of the period. In his admittedly misguided way, he is the only one trying to look out for the best interests of Ranevskaya and her family.
Reading Mr. Kataev, one begins to see the plays in a different light and to understand more fully the deep connection to the stories. Anyone preparing to stage Chekhov could find no more helpful guide than the commentary in this book.
2002-04-19 Russia falls for cartoon heroine news.bbc.co.uk
A profane, drug-taking cartoon character called Masyanya has suddenly become famous in Russia and now has one of the country's top websites.
Masyanya, who has been called the Russian answer to US animated characters Beavis and Butthead, has become a popular phenomenon in just five months.
The success of the website has been a welcome turn of events for Mr Kuvayev, who was sacked by his employer in St Petersburg for spending too much time on Masyanya.
The young computer designer is now in negotiations with Russian MTV for a televised version of the cartoons.
The crudely-drawn character, with her oversized head, bulging eyes and insect-like arms, seems an unlikely cartoon heroine.
"They identify with her because she represents total freedom from responsibility," he added.
But Mr Kuvayev said Masyanya is not for sale.
"There are too many proposals from businessmen who want to use Masyanya to sell their products. I don't want Masyanya to be used by politicians either," he said.
2002-04-07 LOREN GRAHAM. 'Sakharov': From the H-Bomb to Human Rights nytimes.com
2002-03-20 GUY CHAZAN. Foul Cartoon Slacker Masyanya Takes Young Russians by Storm cdi.org
For years, Russia's corporate elite was haunted by fears of devaluation, default and raids by the tax police. Now, they have something else to worry about: "Masyanya," an Internet cartoon that is the distraction of choice for millions of bored young office workers.
A foul-mouthed, pot-smoking slacker living in St. Petersburg, Masyanya has become Russia's answer to "Beavis and Butthead." The cartoon, or multfilm, is a big hit on the Net: Less than five months after the two-minute episodes started appearing online, the creator's Web site, Mult.ru, has been getting 22,000 hits a day.
Crudely drawn, with fruity teenage slang, a maniacal giggle and a penchant for drink, drugs and sex, Masyanya commands a large following among Russia's version of Generation X, the 20- and 30-somethings known for their free-wheeling cynicism and total alienation from politics. "They're mainly white-collar workers in Moscow illicitly surfing the Net during office hours," says Oleg Kuvayev, Masyanya's 35-year-old creator.
Masyanya's best lines -- like "Barman, a pint of cognac!" or "Who's this? The boss? Go to hell, boss, I can't deal with you right now" -- are now bandied about in bars and at water coolers. The appearance of a new episode, usually on a Monday morning, can bring office work to a grinding halt. "We all gather round my computer and have a good laugh," says graphic designer Anastasia Samokhina. "We call the bosses, too, but they don't seem to get it. They don't speak her language."
When she meets her Prince Charming on a deserted tropical beach, his first words are: "Give me 100 bucks till the weekend."
In one cartoon, she calls up a friend to make plans for her birthday party, and reels off a list of controlled substances such as cocaine, Ecstasy and "magic mushrooms" that she procured for the event. Her friend asks if she wants beer. "Oh no," Masyanya says. "Everyone'll get drunk, turn the place upside down. No, don't bring beer, I'm a respectable girl."
2001-09-12 A.O.SCOTT. Reading Chekhov': Janet Malcolm Decodes the Good Doctor nytimes.com
Chekhov's world comes in very modest wrapping. What is inside? Teachers, officers, priests, terrorists, peasants - all real, sometimes attractive, sometimes terrifying - like in real life.
Something similar could be said about Malcolm's own book. Its humdrum title and calm, meditative tone conceal a furious, restless sensibility. What seems like a leisurely stroll through biography, travel writing and textual interpretation is ''in fact'' (if I may borrow Malcolm's deadpan formulation) a fierce assault on literary decorum, and a calm demolition of the ideological defenses that protect us from the writers we claim to love. ''Reading Chekhov'' is, like Geoff Dyer's ''Out of Sheer Rage,'' about its own failure to be something else -- a biography, a critical study, a literary travelogue -- and thus is a radical debunking of those genres.
One good point of pointless (absurd, to be more exact) visit to Yalta is to have a look at Chekhov's villa there (users.i.com.ua
Its modest beauty tells a lot about an author who built it on his own hard-earned money.
Malcolm's desultory wanderings in that city and others suggest that it would have been better to stay home reading Chekhov, and her forays into Chekhov's life yield the same lesson. One of the most gratifying things about ''Reading Chekhov'' is its quiet, vigorous defense of the prerogatives of criticism against the imperial banality of biography. The book was originally commissioned for the Penguin Lives series. That it didn't work out there is hardly surprising, since no book (except, perhaps, ''The Silent Woman,'' Malcolm's earlier book about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes) has so thoroughly demonstrated the uselessness of biography.
Russian religious philosophy is certainly helpful for understanding Chekhov who was actually not religious. Also, unlike Andrey Belyi, Chekhov was not a Symbolist. So, not much discoveries can be made in a murky area of Chekhov's religious symbolism.
''Reading Chekhov'' circles toward an account of a journey he made in 1890 to the prison island of Sakhalin in order to prepare a report on conditions there. While she is respectful of the social concern and scientific ambitions that motivated the trip, the literary nullity of the book Chekhov eventually wrote, ''The Island of Sakhalin,'' provides Malcolm with a decisive piece of evidence for her argument -- paradoxically contained in a work of nonfiction -- that fiction is a morally and philosophically superior form of discourse. ''Even Chekhov, when writing nonfiction, doesn't write like Chekhov,'' she observes.
Sociologically and stylistically perfect depiction of a concentration camp sounds like a bitter contradiction in terms. One can expect a brutal rebellion of "common sense" against any possibility that such depiction can be ever written in any language. However, Chekhov did write and publish ''The Island of Sakhalin" in 1893-1895.
Chekhov with his acid sense of humor would love to put an idea that "fiction is a morally and philosophically superior form of discourse" into the mouth of some of his pedantic characters - maybe professor Serebryakov from "Uncle Vanya"?
But no one writes nonfiction quite like Janet Malcolm. ''We swallow a Chekhov story as if it were an ice, and we cannot account for our feeling of repletion,'' she writes.
Actually, this is more about "proletarian writer" Maxim Gorky who was a great master of feeding hungry souls ad nauseam.
1999-12-09 G.Hazagerov. Vysotskiy' poetry in the context of Ancient Rus and Soviet Russia relga.rsu.ru
• 80 years of Eldar Ryazanov rian.ru
• A.Denikin. The demise of February-September 1917 magister.msk.ru
• A.Galibin. Vladimir Bortko on his "Master and Margarita" rutv.ru
• A.Graynovsky. Gerzhenzon and Mitrofan Poluportyantsev bards.ru
• A.Kirilenko, A.Sharyi. Sophocles and Pussy Riot svobodanews.ru
• A.V.Antipov. Life and Death of Gen.Rokhlin lib.rus.ec
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The First Circle search.barnesandnoble.com
Set in Moscow during a three-day period in December 1949, The First Circle is the story of the prisoner Gleb Nerzhin, a brilliant mathematician. At the age of thirty-one, Nerzhin has survived the war years on the German front and the postwar years in a succession of Russian prisons and labor camps. His story is interwoven with the stories of a dozen fellow prisoners - each an unforgettable human being - from the prison janitor to the tormented Marxist intellectual who designed the Dnieper dam; of the reigning elite and their conflicted subordinates; and of the women, wretched or privileged, bound to these men. A landmark of Soviet literature, The First Circle is as powerful today as it was when it was first published, nearly thirty years ago.
• Alexander Lipson. A Russian Course aurinko25.livejournal.com
• Alexander Pushkin. DUBROVSKY home.freeuk.com
• Alexander Pushkin. THE CAPTAIN'S DAUGHTER home.freeuk.com
• Animations
Bobik and Barbos
Once there was a dog
• Anton Chekhov. An Anonymous Story online-literature.com
endeavor.med.nyu.edu
readprint.com
• Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic lib.ru
Andrei Tarkovsky. Stalker (1979) us.imdb.com
• Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The Snail on the Slope lib.ru
• Artist Alisa Zrazhevskaya izotta.gallery.ru
• B.Gasparov on T.Lysenko ruthenia.ru
• Best Soviet animation video.mail.ru
• Brodsky on Ukrainian independence pseudology.org
V.Kravets. Double will of Joseph Brodsky
• Cats by V.Khlebnikov 2photo.ru
• Chekhov's letters dushu.com.ua
• D.Bykov. Book clones ogoniok.com
• D.Konstantinov's pictures photoweb.ru
• Dana Vitt. Pushkin and cats lublu.lv
• Daniil Kharms. INCIDENCES geocities.com
• David Armand. Autobiography hojja-nusreddin.livejournal.com
• Eteri Chkadua proza.com.ua
• Ethno-trio Troitsa myspace.com
• Exhibition: Everything is relative elementy.ru
N.Krashchin. Units of measurement
• F. Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment sparknotes.com
• F. Dostoyevsky. The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor academic.marist.edu
Russian: lib.ru V. Grand Inquisitor
• Father Aleksander Men. History of religion alexandrmen.ru
alexandrmen.ru
Vladimir Shishkarev. The Men song
Father Alleksander Borisov. Interview on Men
• G.Ltvinova. On national ;politics warrax.net
• How to draw a horse transheekopateli.com
• Ilyich service upsya.livejournal.com
• Kant's letter to the Russian Empress Elizabeth gumer.info
• Labor of Lust: Erotic Metaphors of Soviet Civilisation emory.edu
Mikhail Epstein. After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture.
...And then along comes a poet who whips off a single line. He connects a couple of previously unconnected words -- "There's a labor of lust, and it's in our blood"--and the political economy of socialism, a shapeless, beggarly science, constantly suffering from its inability to grasp its proper subject, attains its ideal explanation.
There is no firm lifelong bond with the object and product of labor. This love is general, public, and belongs to no one, which is why, in the feverish passion of labor, something hopeless and depraved suddenly washes up: you pour your seed together with everyone else's onto the same eggs...
Lust is practically indifferent to the qualities of the partner, so long as, in the words of Fedor Karamazov, it's of the right gender. Labor-lust is equally indifferent to its object; so long as you can get into it, work it over, and lose yourself in it. If labor activities are interchangeable, then equally interchangeable are the individuals who labor.
• Les Podervyanskiy
• Life with an idiot caffeproust.com
www.caffeproust.com In Act 1, the main character, "I", is sentenced to life with an idiot for some crime that is never explained. He goes to the asylum to choose an idiot and takes one who seems to have a brain, but can only say "Eck"; he chooses Vova (Lenin's nickname), who comes back to live with I and Wife. Act 2, all goes well for a while, then Vova goes postal and rips up the apartment. I tries to restrain Vova and argues with his wife about it. Vova throws him to the ground and makes love to the wife. She gets pregnant, and although she wants to keep the child, she has an abortion. This infuriates Vova, who becomes lovers with I instead, and they are happy together. Wife goes mad; Vova kills her, then disappears. This is all too much for I, who loses his own marbles and turns himself into the asylum. Apparently there is a chorus in this opera, too. "When the men become lovers," James H. North writes, "it becomes a 'Chorus of Homosexuals' and eggs them on. Another form of chorus is Marcel Proust, who is occasionally on hand to look after his own interests-- he is Wife's favorite author; Vova tears up his books, and I replaces them."
• Lullabies
• Lyudmila Stanukinas. The Tram in the City intv.ru
• M.Boffe. Something about Cary Grant fark.ru
• M.Epstein russ.ru
• M.Epstein. Pasternak and Mandelshtam magazines.russ.ru
• Manul photo gallery savemanul.org
Prospect Park Zoo
Pallas cat
youtube.com
flywild.livejournal.com
• Mikhail Bulgakov. Master and Margarita cr.middlebury.edu
• Moscow architecture of 1930-1950-ies. Unimplemented projects muar.ru
• N. Gumilev max.mmlc.northwestern.edu
-- The Lost Tram: max.mmlc.northwestern.edu max.mmlc.northwestern.edu
• N.Gumilev. Streetcar gumilev.aha.ru
ualberta.ca
klassika.ru:8014
Mashenka, here you lived, and here you sang,
You wove a rug for me, your love,
Where are your voice and body now,
Can it be that you are dead!
How you sobbed in your chamber,
But I with powdered queue
Was going to present myself to the Empress,
And never again did we meet.
• N.Ivanova-Gladilshchikova. Unpublished memoirs on Akhmatova by L.Bolshintsova izvestia.ru
• Nicholas Berdyaev. Origin of Russian Communism amazon.com
• NIKOLAI GOGOL. The Marriage drama21c.net
• Old New Year / Christmas cards oldkiev.info
• Oleg Korolyev koro-art.com
Genesis
Prodigal son en.wikipedia.org
Tower of ego
Sail
Illusory fish
Apophatic summer en.wikipedia.org
Apohatic good samaritan en.wikipedia.org
• Oleg Kuvaev site sams.spb.ru
• P.Bogdanov,G.Bogdanova. Stasis Krasauskas kleiner.inventech.ru
• P.Danilin. Glamour fascism europublish.ru
• Paul Bracchi, Will Stewart. The curse of Tatu eng.tatysite.net
Of course, almost everything about Tatu was an exercise in cynical manipulation and publicity seeking. In fact, their blatant brand of 'paedo-pop' was created to exploit the disturbing market in underage sex. But among the acres of column inches devoted to Tatu phenomenon, one question was never asked: what effect was it all having on Yulia and Lena themselves?
After all, they were just 14 and 15 (respectively) when they began being paraded around seedy clubs and concert halls in their native Russia performing little more than simulated sex routines to music.
That legacy of exploitation – perhaps child abuse would be more accurate – is shockingly evident today. Yulia, now 19, revealed tearfully in a recent documentary on Russian TV that she has been left feeling suicidal (‘I have such thoughts that I want to die,’ she says tearfully).
She admits that at the height of the duo’s popularity last year she felt pressurised into having an abortion - because she knew that if she kept the baby the image of Tatu would have been shattered. Lena, too, also 19, has suffered from depression and says she feels ‘disgusted’ by her sordid antics with Tatu. In fact she recently turned to religion to ‘redeem my sins’.
First, they have seen little - or nothing - of the millions they made with Tatu. "The girls were never paid well," said a Russian show business source. Even when they were enjoying international chart success, it now emerges, the duo were paid no more than $300 (J165) per concert.
Yulia still lives with her family in a slum flat in a five-story block in Moscow. Even by Russian standards it is particularly grim. Her mother is a chronic diabetic who rarely goes out; her father a small-time businessman who’s fallen on hard times.
Lena, the daughter of a struggling musician, finally managed to scrape together enough money to move into her own apartment in the Russian capital last month. According to friends, it is "nothing luxurious". Indeed, there is only one room. Neither Lena or Yulia own a car.
In fact, they are still under contract to his production company and could incur financial penalties if they leave. A spokesman for Shapovalov confirmed yesterday: "They will pay a lot if they ever decided to split up with Ivan."
Shapovalov, divorced and in his late 30s, it should be pointed out, has just moved into a penthouse in a fashionable district of Moscow. He is ferried around the city in a chauffeur-driven limousine, and much of the estimated J3.5 million fortunes he made from Tatu - says a source who worked with him - is stashed away in offshore accounts. But, then, this is a man who enjoys a sinister reputation.
Only now, however, is the extent of Shapovalov pernicious influence over his ‘proteges’ becoming known. He has always denied, for example, seducing Yulia shortly after she wae selected. But former Tatu song writer Elena Kiper, 28, says the unsavoury rumours are true.
"From the word go Ivan told me he wanted to have sex with Yulia," she said. "He told me he s*****d her on their second meeting. They did it in the back of his car. Yulia was just a young girl from a poor background looking for fame and fortune and Ivan convinced her that was how she could get it."
Indeed, Lena is now hoping to go to college to study law. After joining Tatu the girls did become famous - or imfanous - but the fortune never materialised and they have been left psychologically scared. How they and their parents now wish they could turn back the clock.
• Pavel Sudoplatov. Special operations lib.aldebaran.ru
• PhD theses for MSU dissersovet.ru
• Photo. Dima Zverev photosight.ru
• Photo. V.Karchin karchin.ru
• Pugacheva bio idiot.ru
• R.Svetlov. Police wars of 19c militera.lib.ru
• Religiometer uath.org
• Russia. Kalinnikov Symphony No.1 in G minor homepage2.nifty.com
1st Movement
2nd Movement
3rd Movement
4th Movement
• Russia. Soviet music english.sovmusic.ru
17 Moments of Spring (spy movie)
Amur's Waves
Dark night, The
Katyusha
March of the Soviet Tankists
On the Hills of Manchuria
Saint War, The
Slavyanka's farewell
L.Revuckij. Song About Stalin
Vano Muradeli. March of the Dzerzhinskians (CheKa)
Varshavyanka
Varyag
White Army, Black Baron
• Russian "proverbs" e2k-4d-x-ussr.livejournal.com
• Russian Latvian German strana.lenta.ru
• S.G.Kara-Murza. Consciousness Manipulation kara-murza.ru
• S.Kurginyan. Essence of time kurginyan.ru
• S.P.Novikov on Fomenko hbar.phys.msu.ru
• S.P.Novikov. Crisis of Physics and Mathematics in the late 20c rsuh.ru
• School, 3-8 webserial.net
• Securing the synagogue adolfych.livejournal.com
• Stanislav Plutenko plutenko.ru
artrussia.ru
Abduction of Europe
In the office
art-moscow.com
ljtop.ru
• Stepan Kashirin's cat pictures zoopicture.ru
• Tarkovskiy's polaroids drubin.livejournal.com
• Tarkovsky forum skywalking.com
• Tatyana Gorshunova artnow.ru
• Tatyana Rodionova's cat pictures tm-rodionova.narod.ru
• Tayana Razumovskaya. Masterpieces of Metrazh litera.ru
• The Baba Yaga The Baba Yaga surlalunefairytales.com
• V.Arnold. New obscurantism and Russian Education mccme.ru
• V.Grinko. Philosophy in Russia: paradigms, problems, solutions i-u.ru
• V.K.Almazov. Former inmates on Solzhenitzyn's Gulag lib.rus.ec
• V.Medvedev. How to photograph a tiger naturephotographer.ru
• V.P.Belyanin. Linguistic shock. Russian cursings in foreign languages languages-study.com
• V.Pelevin. Chapayev and Emptiness pelevin.nov.ru
• V.Rudnev. Pragmatic semantics of Winnie-the-Pooh winnie-the-pooh.ru
• V.Yaznevich. St. Lem on Tarkovskiy's Solaris stanislawlem.ru
• VASSILY GROSSMAN vor.ru
Vassily Grossman was born in 1905.When a student of the Moscow State University he began writing short stories.He continued his literary activity working as an engineer in Ukraine.One of the young author's first stories entitled "In the town of Berdichev" drew attention of prominent Russian writer Maxim Gorky who advised Grossman to concentrate on his literary work.In many years a well-known film,"The Commissar", was shot after that short story telling about events of the civil war in a small town.In the 1930s Grossman's short stories and novels about workers and miners were published.
When the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 began the writer went to the front as a war reporter.Essays and reports of the first years of the war were a good school of journalism for Vassily Grossman and attempts to penetrate into the gist of the war.Shortly his novel "The People is Immortal" appeared.It was published by a newspaper at the time when the Nazis launched their summer offensive.One of the most important events of the war--the Stalingrad Battle--is described in his other book entitled "Stalingrad".
Vassily Grossman continued writing about the Stalingrad Battle after the war.His novel in two parts entitled "The Right Cause" and "Life and Destiny" is considered to be one of the best books about the Great Patriotic War.He put his heart and soul into it.That is the truth about the war through the eyes of the author.The novel is tragic.The book's way to the reader was not easy. The first part of the novel was subjected to severe criticism whereas the second part - "Life and Destiny" - became available for general public some 25 years after it was written.Few of the author's post-war short stories saw the light during his lifetime.Those short stories about the gone-by war are the author's reflections about future of the world,totalitarianism and freedom.Grossman's last book was "Everything Goes by..." It was published when the author was already dead. Owing to his friends and relatives everything that was told by that kind and honest writer about life of the nation in various historical epochs has found its way to readers.
• Vera Nabokova pseudology.org
• Vladimir Orlov. Double agent. Notes of Russian counterintellgence agent
• Vladimir Vysotsky kulichki.ru
davar.net
going-out.livejournal.com
vorontsova-nvu.livejournal.com
• Why you don't want to have a dog blogs.tks.ru
• Ye.Makarenko. Sologub's "Petty devil" lit.1september.ru
• Yu.Murin. Volkogonov's collection sovsekretno.ru
• yuz.ru yuz.ru
