They had their own foregatherings: They, over goblets of wine, they, over a glass of Russian vodka… For trenchant oratory famed, the members of this group assembled at unquiet Nikita’s, at circumspect Ilya’s.
“
| — | Alexander Pushkin, describing the 1825 Decembrists’ uprising. |
part of the Trans-Siberian Railway, crossing the Kama River, Ural Mountains Region, ca. 1910.
see more photos of Russia from 1909 - 1912 here: Russia in Color: A Century Ago
Photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun.
“I do not complain about anything and i almost like it here, although i have never been here before and know nothing about this place.” - Andrei Monastyrski
Dgen Pobedy/Victory Day, May 9th, 2005 (60 year anniversary of Germany’s surrender to the Russians). St. Petersburg, RU. Petrogradskaya. Russians are very proud of this day.
Language
Ask any child in America and they’ll tell you: the English alphabet is so well-organized it rhymes. In fact they will probably sing it:
A B C D E F G,
H I J K L M N O P,
Q R S T U V,
W X Y and Z.
But Russian words look oppressive when written with English letters and so an entirely separate alphabet was created. Like its English counterpart, this other alphabet starts out simply enough:
А Б В Г Д Е Ё …
Then along the way it gets flustered:
…Ж З И Й…
Gathers its composure:
…К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф…
Only to lose it completely in the end:
…Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я.
The result of this is that even Russians are hard-pressed to remember the correct order of their own alphabet. In frustration some letters have been cast away; others remain, though they are seemingly irrelevant.
Fortunately, an alphabet is not about its parts, but about how it works as a whole. The important thing is that all the letters are there—in some order—and that if you start with A and progress slowly and patiently, letter by letter, and if you don’t let the disorder discourage you, then you will eventually end up at Я.
— A.J. Perry.
