January 12, 2017

Exercise! Frozen bikes, illegal yoga, and sturdy stolen statues


Exercise! Frozen bikes, illegal yoga, and sturdy stolen statues

Sport can be hazardous to your health

1. Dreaming of a bike Christmas: what better way to celebrate -27 degrees (-17 F) temperatures than a brisk bike ride through the capital? That’s what about 500 bicyclists did in Moscow on Sunday. They had two goals: first, prove that bicycles are workable transportation all year long. Second: not get hypothermia. At least false beards, fur coats, and heated handlebars could help out with the latter.

bicycling.com

2. How much do you love your honey pie? Enough to swipe a statue from a public park for a New Year’s present? That was one Moscow man’s idea of a gift for his girlfriend, but he was caught red-handed while trying to make away with a gilded statue from Sokolniki Park. The statue – which depicts a “Chief Accountant Fairy” (you know, one of those) – cost about 3 million rubles. Any chief accountant would bewail its disappearance, so it’s lucky a good fairy ensured its return.

3. Do a downward dog...all the way to the jailhouse. A yoga teacher is on trial for suspected illegal missionary work after a lecture on yogic philosophy. The man who filed a complaint against the yogi is a Russian Orthodox activist whose wife left him to join a cult – presumably linked to yoga. The trial is controversial, with the yogi claiming his lecture was purely academic and one of the police officers involved doubting his own signature on the police report. Sounds like everyone involved needs a good meditate.

In Odder News

  • What did 2017 look like in 1967? National Geographic shows you exactly how the Soviet past imagined the future.
  • Russia’s got plenty of nature, but there’s plenty left unexplored. Take a peek at some new natural wonders.
  • Learning the names of Russia’s oblasts? Now you can do it through song, at last! Really, that’s a line in it. With 85 federal subjects of Russia, it only gets better.

Quote of the Week

“In a sense, we can say that yoga merges with religion. And in fact it’s been that way since the beginning, because the root of ‘yoga,’ which means ‘connection,’ carries the same meaning as the Latin words ‘religare’ or ‘religion,’ that is, a person who goes the way of yoga communicates with God.”
—The words that allegedly triggered the police to arrest Dmitry Ugai while he was giving a lecture on the history and philosophy of yoga.

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Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Bilingual series of short, lesser known, but highly significant works that show the traditional view of Dostoyevsky as a dour, intense, philosophical writer to be unnecessarily one-sided. 
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Okudzhava Bilingual

Okudzhava Bilingual

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Woe From Wit (bilingual)

Woe From Wit (bilingual)

One of the most famous works of Russian literature, the four-act comedy in verse Woe from Wit skewers staid, nineteenth century Russian society, and it positively teems with “winged phrases” that are essential colloquialisms for students of Russian and Russian culture.
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
The Moscow Eccentric

The Moscow Eccentric

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Maria's War: A Soldier's Autobiography

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Jews in Service to the Tsar

Jews in Service to the Tsar

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Fish: A History of One Migration

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