Coming to a new city, you (I) somehow manage to notice just about anything, most of which a lot of citizens would ignore. And even though a lot of you, dear readers, sit abroad and don’t read in...
My visit to Yekaterinburg was partly for work, and one of my tasks was to explore the public gardens in the city. Granted there were not too many of them, I still managed to identify a few places wher...
Lisa Mokhova (by Vladimir Begma) I have been thinking recently that I barely wrote anything about Quiet Flows the Don in the last 2 years. Perhaps, I was unconsciously waiting for the exhibition of pa...
There seems to be something inexplicably attractive about the letter “I”. The American protagonist of Eat, Play, Love went, respectively, to Italy, India, and Indonesia in search of her tr...
I cannot get enough of this song. This is the kind of tune from the years where I wished I had lived. I absolutely love 1970s, and this song by Celentano oozes tons of the time....
Jerzi Grotowski, a Polish stage director and theatre philosopher, even got to study at the Lunacharsky Institute of Theatre Arts for two years in 1950s. Although they evidently didn’t miss him g...
Critics consider Ilya Glazunov's illustrations to An Unknown Lady by Alexander Blok to be the overall finest illustrations of Blok's work....
I visited the Bolshoi Theatre only once, in early 1999. Together with my uni friend we listened to the Stone Guest (Don Juan) opera. We sat literally under the roof, and I got to see the beautiful mur...
I watched The Man Who Saved the World in November 2005. The first time we observe someone’s attempt to go out of their way to replicate something it usually makes us laugh. So, I guess the attit...
Manchester Hindu Cow, 2007 Yekaterinburg Cow, 2011 One of my early years in Manchester was marked by facing the cows. Painted creatures were awaiting me everywhere – pretty much like the penguin...