Yesterday I had the most pleasant chance to attend a presentation of a book by Slava Polunin, Russian-born best clown in the world. Called Stairway To Heaven, it has little to do with Led Zeppelin; on...
I have no idea exactly how many yoga clubs there are in Moscow. According to this site, there should be at least 270. The so-called “non-traditional” practices were popular even before 199...
Italian Impressions by Alexander Blok is a curious example of the Russian Symbolist poet visiting Italy and returning largely unimpressed...
A friend of mine, painter Svetlana, sent me this photo from her home garden. This sun-brimming ‘portrait’ of a lily marks the beginning of summer and brought to mind this Shakespearean son...
Google celebrates the centenary of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts with a delicate Doodle The impressive building of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Volkhonka St., across the road from the restored...
One of the hallmarks of Moscow Design Week 2011 was Jacopo Foggini’s Matrioska installation. Fashion designers do, from time to time, pay homage to one of Russia’s most recognisable symbol...
Bulat Okudzhava clad in white Moscow “Occupy” protests move from one spot to another, sometimes escaping the police, sometimes not. And while the government gives gentle, if persistent, hi...
You might remember me saying that one thing I terribly missed while in England were the sunsets I could watch from my window in Moscow. “Much ado about sunsets! They’re beautiful anywhere!...
Multiculturalism entails multilingualism, and different countries react to the issue differently. Most people in the UK whom I came across were more positive than not about the fact that they could he...
The scene I saw today at the Moscow State University brings to mind Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, if only in a very generic sense, though. When I was a student graduating 10 years ago we d...