You know that moment when a football team wins the Superbowl and the reporters run up to them and ask what they’re going to do now and how they all say “go to Disneyland/world!” or something like that? Now imagine you’ve found yourself on the winning side of the most massive war the world has […]

“Dark is the Night” is a beautiful ballad sung by Mark Bernes in the movie Two Warriors (1943). Soulful and melancholic, this song has become ingrained into popular Russian culture long after the events of the war came to pass. In the film, he sings in the “dugout against the background of his fellow soldiers.” Further, […]

They say if you want your vision to become reality, you must speak it into existence. Perhaps this is what Joseph Stalin had in mind as he began to encourage the pursuit of the ideal socialist representation. Through media such as art, literature, and music, Stalin and the Party encouraged (mandated is perhaps a more […]

Take a given problem such as illiteracy in Russian society during the early 20th century. Combine that with an eventful and turbulent political society. What is the end result? Individuals who are unable to consume print media detailing these events and therefore ignorance of all that is not word-of-mouth. But again, given a problem, what […]

Valentine Serov, a portrait painter and contributor of the Peredvizhniki, was a man who not only created art that was realistic and pleasing to the eye. He created works which evoked a sense of peace or turbulence, groundedness or lofty nature, with his use of color and impressionistic style. While some see the word ‘realism’ and […]