Two crosses of Konstantin Batiushkov
This year marks the 230th anniversary of the birth of Konstantin Nikolaevich Batyushkov (1787–1855) and the 200th anniversary of the release of his only book, the two-volume book Experiments in…

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strip tease
“European Herald” - Karamzin magazine
Creativity Karamzin in the years of the reign of Alexander I is of considerable interest. A sentimentalist writer, an individualist, essentially his temperament, who was first interested in mainly his…

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Books about the art market
Several years ago I bought almost all books on the art market almost in a row and gradually created my own library of this literature. I have it all in…

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wanders alone in the desert

Bogdanovich “Darling”

The content of “Darling” is taken from La Fontaine’s prose work “The Love of Psyche and Cupid” (“Les amours de Psyché et de Cupidon”). The content of this work, in turn, was borrowed by the author from Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass.

In the work of Apuleius, the main idea is that the soul, immersed in sensuality, matter afterwards, thanks to the initiation into the sacraments, is purified and transformed. The soul of a woman (Psyche), having lost its original purity, should as a slave of Love (Venus) undergo a series of severe tests in order to ascend to the divine bridegroom – Eros (Cupid, Cupid). Continue reading

Boyardo, Matteo Maria, and his “Roland in Love”
Matteo Maria Boyardo (1434 or 1441-1494) was descended from a noble surname, who zealously served the Este family (who owned Ferrara and Modena) and received from him in 1423 fief…

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Image and theme of the war in Tolstoy's “Sevastopol Stories”
In the military stories (“Raid”, “Forest Cutting”, “Sevastopol in December 1854, in May and August 1855”) Tolstoy dwells on the question of how legitimate war, demanding so many bloody victims,…

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