Привет!
I'm Bernadette, and this is the tiny corner of the internet where I stash away photos and scribble down my impressions of Petersburg. For three and a half months, I will be wondering around the city mostly busy trying not to fall on my face (due to over excitement, language mishaps and gaffes, eternally icy sidewalks, etc etc).
tales from petersburg (and other horrors)
“…This book will make you love Gogol. And that is the proper thing to do.”
-A comment from a review of Nikolai Gogol by Vladimir Nabokov.
Title Page of ‘Theatre’, 1907. Konstantin Somov.
Lost in Space: What really happened to the USSR’s missing cosmonauts?
There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going.
It is the ultimate in Cold War legends: that at the dawn of the Space Age, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union had two space programmes, one a public programme, the other a ‘black’ one, in which far more daring and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. It was assumed that Russia’s Black Ops, if they existed at all, would remain secret forever.
The ‘Lost Cosmonauts’ debate has been reawakened thanks to a new investigation into the efforts of two ingenious, radio-mad young Italian brothers who, starting in 1957, hacked into both Russia’s and NASA’s space programmes – so effectively that the Russians, it seems, may have wanted them dead.
(via whipporwill)
‘dialogue’ by sergei borisov, 1983
glasnost: soviet non-conformist art from the 1980s
haunch of venision is now showing one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of soviet non-conformist art from the 1980s and early 1990s. over 100 works are included in the show, representing a variety of mediums. all the works on show respond to the glasnost and perestroika, economic and political reforms introduced by mikhail gorbachev that ended the cold war. the artists on show rebelled against the state-sanctioned art, creating their own styles that was provocative and new.
Tattoo #244 doesn’t look too incriminating. Can you picture that little guy with a bow tie on the upper arm of a hardened Soviet outlaw??
russian criminal tattoos. bottom-right: “All power to the godfather!”
Chillin.
