“Siena: the Rise of Painting” (a few photos)

I was lucky enough to take a few photos inside the exhibition, and despite the poor quality one still could appreciate the utter splendour of the paintings, frescos and sculptures.

“Siena: the Rise of Painting” (The National Gallery)

Before meeting with our friends, we had some time to finally attend a much anticipated exhibition that is still going on* at the National Gallery, “Siena: the Rise of Painting”: it was, without a doubt, absolutely splendid.

The exhibition covers one of my most beloved periods in Italian art, and mediaeval art in particular, the Trecento, when the traces of the mighty Byzantium empire are fading, starting to form what we call now a Western art canon. Duccio di Buoninsegna, the founder of the Sienese school, was the one who made— and established—that unmistakable golden hue on tempera to look simultaneously divine and vigorously alive; his apprentices and followers, Simone Martini (the one whom Petrarch asked to create the portrait of his Muse, Laura), the Lorenzetti brothers and others, continued and developed his art ethos.

One of the lamest drawbacks of getting old is a declining crave for chocolate and ice cream, which is kinda sad.

Sunday wanderings: Fulbourn (photos)

 And as usual a few photos  illustrating the previous post:

Sunday wanderings: Fulbourn

Oddly enough, I haven’t managed to visit the grand metropolis of Fulbourn during these almost 13 years I’ve lived in England until today, but finally mischief was managed. It took us under four hours (if to include lunch in Fulbourn’s central pub on the High St, The Six Bells) and plenty of sun, which, as I found out later in the evening, was strong enough to give me that unmistakable red face.

The actual road was dull at places (same identical housing from the late 70s here and there), but the closer our destination the better the views became: a flat land, patchy with agricultural fields and wildflower meadows full of the usual cow parsley and dandelions, looking strikingly lovely. There was an old windmill on the horizon, too.

Fulbourn itself seemed prosperous enough to have listed buildings with thatched roofs at every cul-de-sac, and the front gardens were full of lilacs, wild roses and very first peonies: it was evident that the residents were competing with each other on whose terrace looked better. I have no idea, as they all were beautiful.

One simply cannot get tired of pomegranate-shaped little vases, I guess:

“Night visions: fantastic gloomth: Victor Hugo the artist” by James Hall (TLS)

Fuseli? Walpole? Hugo!

The drawings of Victor Hugo (1802–85), of which about 3,000 survive, mark the smouldering confluence of night scenes and night drawing. Hugo began making caricatures c.1830, then drew landscape views and architecture for his own amusement and as a kind of spiritual exercise. Technically daring and courting accident, they were made on his travels, at home with his wife and children, during seances, but mostly on the dining-room table of his lifelong lover, the actress Juliette Drouet, who followed him into exile in Jersey and Guernsey (1852–70). Only a handful of the seventy-seven drawings in an impressively lugubrious show at the Royal Academy look as though they were made during the day. They are early travel sketches, tremulously wiry architectural bits and bobs, gothicky but insufficiently picturesque to be “ye olde” or “pre-loved”. Daylight strips them down to “poor, bare, forked” things, vivisections revealing shameful dilapidation and structural nervous exhaustion. The author of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) was a pioneering advocate of preserving and restoring gothic buildings, but artistically he was half in love with their decline and death. ©

День Победы: 80 лет

Я сегодня не успею к памятнику Неизвестному Солдату, который воздвигнут у нашего Ботсада — на него падают длинные тени сикомор и акаций, — но мысленно я там. И надеюсь, что английский паренек, ушедший на фронт прямо со студенческой скамьи лучшего университета мира, там, в раю, передаст привет всем нашим родным и близким, павшим на той войне. Потому что там они все говорят на одном языке.

С Праздником! С Днем Победы и Днем Памяти! Царствие им всем Небесное, вечный покой.

VE Day-2025

In Retrospect

The world asks a great deal of the poppies,
insists they carry the wounds of war
and shoulder the weight of remembrance.
Such flimsy, wavering plants;
we painted their flowers the colour of blood
and punched dark holes in their heads
as if bullets had passed through,
then trimmed them with green sprigs of hope.
And from deep in the seeds we concocted
the essence of sleep and dreams and resting-in-peace.
Almost weightless even in full bloom
we made them souls, the poppies, souls
of those who we lost, and – let it be said –
those who we killed.

 Три года, как нет моего мальчика. Помню и скорблю.

“A Deleuzian Conversion” by Claire Colebrook (EUP)

Yet it feels at times that their works have become obsolete (they aren’t, but the feeling remains).

It was in this post-1990s context that reading Deleuze and Guattari was remarkably transformative (despite being contemporaneous with the other French philosophers who had been taken up in a supposed general textualism, anti-realism or anti-essentialism). Things perhaps started with a little too much of a market correction, as if Derrida had said everything was text, Foucault had said everything was discourse, and the feminists had erased the body. Reading Deleuze and Guattari as if they provided the cure for linguistic idealism or textualism not only fails to recognize the ways in which they were part of a milieu attempting to think forms of difference beyond signifying systems, but also misses the subtle but revolutionary practice of philosophical intuition: we may always be asking questions from a distinct political formation, but those formations invite the creative and speculative endeavour of exploring their actual conditions of genesis. ©

Burwish Manor: a long-ish walk (a few photos)

 And a few photos to illustrate the previous post:

Burwish Manor: a long-ish walk (a brief recap)

The weather was somewhat challenging today, but it didn’t affect our plans for the day: to visit Burwash Manor in Barton, which is about 4/4,5 miles south-west from Cambridge (centre) via Grantchester.

Boy oh boy, is Cambridgeshire buzzing with bloom! Despite a chilly spell (temperatures dropped from feverishly high +26 to more or less normal +15), everything is blossoming and fragrant—lilacs, wisteria, cherry flowers, rhododendrons, etc, etc, etc.

Burwash Manor is as traditional as one could imagine for spending desperately middle class leisure time—ridiculously overpriced sourdoughs and fancy butters, cheeses and chutneys, biscuits, locally sourced honey, chocolates and jams. Their cafe is heavenly, and the walk back was pleasant and soothing. 14 km — checked!

“Empire’s fall: The shifting boundaries of Russian literature” by Boris Dralyuk (TLS)

I should ask Prof. Franklin about this volume next time I see him.

The first of the strands is organized around “Movements”, in which the contributors subtly challenge and revise the traditional scheme of periodization favoured by Moser, acknowledging from the outset, for instance, that the texts of the “Age of Devotion” – treated with supreme nuance by Franklin – are the shared inheritance of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian cultures, not merely the first stage in the development of Russian literature [...] ©

it took me literally 13 years to finally reframe these precious (to me) artworks from my past. Quite happy with the result:

May is the best month to get these two neat gems (god only knows when I’ll manage to go through them: let’s hope it happens in the near future):

Merry May!
***
Pink, small, and punctual,
Aromatic, low,
Covert in April,
Candid in May ©

A tiny shrub that L. bought four or five years ago for our front garden is blooming intensely at the moment: due to lack of space we didn’t manage to plant a *real* lilac (they are fairly large), but the mini version isn’t bad at all! It’s luscious, and fragrant, and as beautiful as its big counterpart.

“Harsh Sentences: H. P. Lovecraft v. Ernest Hemingway”: a brilliant comparative essay from Deepcuts

TWIMC. Just a friendly reminder of how a picture perfect article in comparative studies must look like. Impeccably done: chapeau, Bobby Dee.

For H. P. Lovecraft, missing Hemingway would have been much more difficult—nor did he. Though they were very different in their fictional focus, output, and success, Lovecraft and Hemingway were still contemporaries, and there are a number of references to Hemingway and his works in Lovecraft’s letters. These mentions of Ernest Hemingway, who had not yet become “Papa” of later years, reflect more on Lovecraft than on Hemingway himself, but show Lovecraft both coming to grips with a Modern writer of very different style and interests and how Hemingway’s influence spread.

Trends come from deeper sources than what is written on the surface of literature, and the average domestic adjustments of 1980 or 2030 will not depend on the question of whether Ernest Hemingway is suppressed or encouraged in 1930.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, June 1930?, LMM 267

So, since L. is an FRS, he got an invitation to the annual July soirée with the endnote: “Carriages at 10 p.m.”

What it means is that the soirée itself will be over at ten (with no carriages waiting for you), but I love that instead of saying “you’ll be kicked out,” the organisers are using a dainty euphemism. Nice!

Nothings and triviality

Came across the workshop in my subscription titled “Between SCOPUS fetishisation, predatory journals and survival strategies of researchers.”

Immediately felt like one of those characters in zombies/dystopian/Apocalypse games.

Getting a random notification from Academia dot edu that my paper was cited by a dear colleague of mine who’s long dead made me extremely sad. Not that it happened for the first time (it didn’t) and I am not a huge fan of the randomised revenue model of the platform either, yet it somehow hit differently today. Memento mori, but without the usual irony.

I found a new little piece for one of our smaller rooms, a lovely one by the Norfolk born and bred artist, Dee Nickerson. Dee’s sublime artworks perfectly reflect the rural world of East Anglia: that’s why she’s so loved here. One can find some of her prints and cards on the Green Pebble website (highly recommended, if you want to greet your friends with something really beautiful and special).

...и немножко нервно

«24-летний поэт Александр Блок курит папиросу за папиросой, то и дело вскакивает и подходит к окну: он слышал выстрелы и знает, что войска стреляли в мирных людей» © etc. — а где про нервные тонкие пальцы, густые клубы дыма и зарево над крышами™? Унесите.

A Gothic Machen-esque/Jamesian hauntological travelog that I briefly mentioned in March, is finally here. The chapter that immediately drew my attention was the one about Sebald’s Land: so far so good.

A brief disclaimer

I’ve seen discussions about the 2010 adaptation of “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” (featuring the late John Hart as Parkin) resurfacing, and all I can say is to repeat my previous comment about it: it’s overall an ok film, if one likes Haneke and his grim portrayal of relationships in the later stages of life, but an awful adaptation, which doesn’t do any justice to MRJ.

Down through the tomb's inward arch

He has shouldered out into Limbo

to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:

the merciful dead, the prophets,

the innocents just His own age and those

unnumbered others waiting here

unaware, in an endless void He is ending

now, stooping to tug at their hands,

to pull them from their sarcophagi,

dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,

neighbor in death, Golgotha dust

still streaked on the dried sweat of his body

no one had washed and anointed, is here,

for sequence is not known in Limbo;

the promise, given from cross to cross

at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.

People still ask me sometimes why I bother with making Kulichi, or Paski*, every year, as it involves a lot of effort and time, and, as per usual my only answer is cherished memories of my Babushka who made them following her own recipe, with cinnamon and cloves (yes, I told her story at some point, but quite a while ago).

Our neighbours, whom she always shared her Kulichi with, praised them as the most delicious out there—“those dark Paski by Valentina Alexandrovna are the best,” they repeated. It was true: they were perfect. And it was my duty to figure out the recipe and then to try and recreate it, so every year I do exactly this.

No matter how hard I try, I know that hers were better anyway, and, paradoxically, it makes me happy, as it evokes lots of lovely memories about her and my childhood. I guess, it is my service now, which confirms to me that He is truly Risen.

_______________

* You can call them either Orthodox Easter cakes or, more correctly, Easter feast bread

Пасха-2025

Христос Воскресе! Christ is Risen! Χριστός Ανέστη! Christus Resurrexit!

Христос воскресе из мертвых, смертию смерть поправ, и сущим во гробех живот даровав!

Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!

Holy Saturday: Orthodox Eve

When You descended to death, O Life Immortal, / You slayed hell with the splendor of Your Godhead, / and when from the depths You raised the dead, / all the Powers of Heaven cried out, / O Giver of Life, Christ our God, glory to You!

The Angel came to the myrrh-bearing women at the tomb and said: “Myrrh is fitting for the dead, but Christ has shown Himself a stranger to corruption.”

Holy Friday

Easter eggs (Pysanky) are ready, it’s time to do the rest.