15 April 2018. N S Gumilyov on Peace and the World

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N S Gumilyov isn’t well-known in English… poetry is notoriously hard to translate. Nikolai Stepanovich loved wordplay, and that’s almost impossible to render in another language. In the above quote, he played on the fact that мир means both “peace” and “world” in Russian… you can only trick out the meaning from the context. There’s much of that sort of thing in Gumilyov’s works… it’s why so many Russian-speakers love his poetry and writing.

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2 December 2017. “Russian” ISN’T a Label On Your Jeans… Nor Does It Have Anything to Do With “Whiteness”

A Portrait of the Author L N Tolstoy

Ivan Kramskoi

1873

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Being Russian doesn’t mean that one has a certain skin-colour, certain ethnic roots, or a certain hair-colour. Someone Russian in spirit is a person that won’t sleep peacefully if they know that injustice is being done somewhere. To be Russian means that a person will seek the truth until the end, always, and in every circumstance. Russians evaluate all that goes on in accord with their conscience; each has their own opinion on every matter that concerns them.

Graf L N Tolstoy

12 November 2017. 196th Anniversary of the Birth of F M Dostoyevsky

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18 April 2017. A Piece of Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem”

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