Category Results

These days, unfortunately, we all need to become familiar with the terminology for extreme weather and climate change, if only to know when we should dash into the basement or pack up and run.

Alexandra Kosteniuk, 17, is not likely most people’s stereotype of a female chess champion. The pretty young Russian sports a provocative smile and a devilish spark in her eye—a far cry from the bookish, hard-nosed competitor some might be led to expect.

When young Andrei Korolyov drew his 400th portrait, he made it to the Russian Book of Records. Soon after, a jury of adult artists and art scholars issued Korolyov an official diploma testifying that his portraits “are characterized by an individual style and bear a resemblance to the original.”

From early in his “happy Soviet childhood,” Andrei Korkunov, 39, dreamed of becoming a factory director. That dream has come true in ways a young Soviet could not have imagined.

Maria Kiselyova dedicated sixteen years to her sport and won two gold medals. But at the end of 2000 she decided to quit sports and take a chance as a sports commentator with NTV channel.

A region's housing woes could be solved at the cost of a few days of Russia's War on Ukraine.

In this issue's language insert, we look at French words that have made their way into Russian. (Link to article downloads PDF of the page.)

For fifty years, Empress Maria Feodorovna (1759–1828) shaped Pavlovsk Park into one of the most celebrated English-style landscapes in Europe, and into a political instrument. Though her position as a consort and later dowager empress was structurally precarious, Maria Feodorovna used garden design, planting, and architecture to build relationships, conduct diplomacy, and argue for causes ranging from the preservation of serfdom to the commemoration of Russia's victory over Napoleon. This talk draws on my new book to explore Pavlovsk as a primary source for understanding women's political agency at the Russian imperial court. Moving chronologically from Maria Feodorovna's arrival as Grand Duchess in 1776 through her decades as the garden's main patron, I trace how she navigated shifting relationships with Catherine II, Paul I, and Alexander I by using flowers, monuments, and diplomatic exchanges of exotic seeds to signal loyalty, mourning, fertility, and authority. I argue that green spaces, often dismissed as decorative or domestic, in fact gave elite women like Maria Feodorovna a rare channel for political voice, at a moment when few other avenues were open to them.

SPEAKER: Ekaterina Heath (University of Sydney)

SOBESEDNIK: Alexander Martin (University of Notre Dame)

Recent works by Ukrainian-born artist Elena Kalman that reflect on moments of disruption and what endures beyond them

Kalman’s paintings depict landscapes, roads, and imagined environments marked by instability, including falling trees, fractured structures, and distant explosions, alongside images of water, sky, and terrain that persist. Created in a time shaped by war and ongoing global uncertainty, these works place scenes of rupture in direct relation to the natural world.

The artist writes, “My work is shaped by the tension between catastrophe and continuity, between the moments when the world seems to fracture and the deeper forces that endure beyond every crisis.”

Kalman received her Master of Architecture degree from the Moscow Architecture Institute, the birthplace of Russian Constructivism, and her undergraduate degree in art from the Kyiv Art Institute. She immigrated to the United States in 1979 and founded the Stamford, Connecticut-based firm Elena Kalman Architects in 1988. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States. Ukraine Defiant: Paintings by Elena Kalman, a series sparked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was presented at The Museum of Russian Art in 2023.