Calendar of 1964: Us and Them.

An old cal­en­dar of 1964 pic­tur­ing a set of remark­able cit­i­zens of the world: a Soviet per­son next to its Amer­i­can coun­ter­part. Sadly there is no anno­ta­tion left to fig­ure what the mes­sage was — infor­ma­tive, pro­pa­gan­dist or other, so the faces below are torn out of con­text. But it is still nice to have a look at some Soviet artist’s work.

It would have been a brief post, so we thought we’d include the major achieve­ments of these great men.

001w26gh1 370x500 Calendar of 1964: Us and Them.

Movie Pro­duc­ers: Sergey Eisen­stein & David W Grifith

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Poetic Tuesday: Boris Pasternak, Winter Night

It has been a good while since we decided to broaden our for­mat a lit­tle and intro­duce some new excit­ing series for our blog. So today we are intro­duc­ing our Poetic Tues­day: every Tues­day we will (try to) post a remark­able Soviet poem, most prob­a­bly on a fort­nightly basis.  This par­tic­u­lar poem, Win­ter Night by Nobel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture of 1958, the author of Doc­tor Zhivago, Boris Paster­nak has been hand picked to open this col­lec­tion. We thank Andrey Kneller for the trans­la­tion. The best way to enjoy it, we sug­gest, is by click­ing Read More.., then play the youtube video and when the words begin, read the poem. The video fea­tures Win­ter Night read in Russ­ian by Boris Vetrov, vio­lin by Secret Gar­den. It is truly mov­ing — we hope you enjoy it as much as we do. Thanks for being such a won­der­ful audi­ence — you are a plea­sure to write for.

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