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“... to the old housekeeper’s anecdotes and folk tales, and write. Such retreats were important in Aleksandr Pushkin’s compressed life (he was born in 1799 and fatally wounded in a duel in 1837). He wrote in these houses, and wrote about them. He wrote about love, and war, and history, and banditry, but the to and fro between the rural and the urban ...”

“... that Tchaikovsky set Eugene Onegin to music, not Rossini, the composer of deep shallows. Pushkin, according to T.J. Binyon’s remarkable biography, became ‘addicted’ to Rossini while living in Odessa, where an Italian opera company was visiting, and though Binyon makes nothing of it, it rather blares at us, as writers’ tastes in music so often ...”

“... The appearance of the second volume of Avril Pyman’s life of Aleksandr Blok to join the first, published last year, brings her enterprise, the fruit of some twenty years’ work on the poet, to a triumphant conclusion. Blok’s life is well-documented, and the period is almost too rich in contemporary memoirs. Dr Pyman demonstrates a complete mastery of the sources, both printed and in manuscript, using the original diaries, notebooks and letters in Russian archives to supplement the expurgated Soviet editions ...”

“... involved with the gathering of Russian folktales in the 19th and 20th centuries, starting with Aleksandr Afanasyev, the one-man Russian equivalent of the Brothers Grimm, whose first collection was published in eight volumes between 1855 and 1867. Chandler has also included literary interpreters of the folktale tradition, both famous, like ...”

“... group that had formed around Khlebnikov’s self-professed heir, the now largely forgotten poet Aleksandr Tufanov. Through these connections, Kharms met a number of other poets and writers, with whom he founded an experimental theatre group in 1927; this in turn was the basis for a new literary movement called the Society for Real Art. Oberiu, its slightly ...”

“... original work. Earlier writers had also reworked folk tales: Gogol retold Ukrainian folk tales, Pushkin turned Russian ones into verse. From 1855 to 1864 the ethnographer Aleksandr Afanasiev published Russian folk tales in serial form; and with titles like ‘The Dead Body’ and ‘The Peasant and the Corpse’, these ...”

“... renamed several main thoroughfares after themselves and hung a sign from the neck of a statue of Pushkin reading ‘I’m with the Imaginists’); they ran a bookshop and hounded out customers attempting to buy work by their rivals, while happily promoting their own books, of which they produced more than thirty in 1920 and 1921 alone. But with the exception ...”

“... boutique. In 2007, Chanel No. 5 wafted through the halls of an exhibition of Chanel fashion in the Pushkin Museum. The ‘little black dress’ was paired with avant-garde designs by Aleksandr Rodchenko, while Chanel’s Russian embroidery – perhaps even made under Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna’s direction – was hung ...”

“... Jakobson estimated that a third of Russian fairy tales were unknown outside the country). Pushkin, Leskov, Platonov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinksy, Kandinsky and Chagall drew inspiration from the oral literature polite society had hitherto left in the fields or the kitchen. They were influenced not only by the stories themselves, but also by the ...”

“... who soon showed a talent for acting and a bossy taste for leadership. He discovered books and let Pushkin, Belinsky, Gogol and above all Lermontov blow his adolescent mind, while winning approval in the Komsomol youth movement. A girlfriend remembered that ‘he was too energetic, too serious, so organised’. The Red Banner award contributed to his ...”