What to expect and what not to expect from Russian politics in N years

About Walter Benjamin's main unfinished work Walter Benjamin's "Passages" has been called an anthology of the culture and everyday life of Paris in the mid-19th century - in any case, the genre nature of this book is not easy to determine. The author worked on it for many years until his death - and left it unfinished. Perhaps, Ivan Davydov believes, this is because life itself, which Benjamin tried to describe in its entirety, is incomplete.

About the book “In the Land of Ice and Fire. Forgotten Letters of Lord Royston and Mr. Poinsett from the Russian Empire" “In Russia, people are not burdened with the obligation to think with their own heads, and power is divided between the Emperor, the Whip, the Bayonet and the Stick,” wrote one bored English lord, who at the beginning of the 19th century went to get acquainted with the distant northern country.

About the two-volume book “Visual representations of Russianness in the Russian Empire of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries” It may seem that the history of costume is not the most exciting topic unless you are specifically interested in it. Maria Leskinen's book proves the opposite: the story of how the Russian national costume was invented in the 19th and 20th centuries inevitably turns into a discussion about the invention of the Russian nation.

Ivan Davydov - about the diaries of Viktor Clementere In Russia, forty years after the first publication in the GDR, the diaries of Viktor Clemerer, a German Jew who lived under the Third Reich and managed to carefully document everything that was happening around him - from the language of newspaper editorials to the death of friends in concentration camps and disasters on the Eastern Front.

Ivan Davydov - about the diaries of Victor Klemperer In Russia, forty years after the first publication in the GDR, the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who lived under the Third Reich and managed to carefully document everything that happened around him - from the language of newspaper editorials to the death of friends in concentration camps and disasters on the Eastern Front - were published.

Why and why the deputies took up the quadrober? Briefly Russia has a new trouble. Children play animals. The patriotic public hits the alarm, and deputies are preparing prohibitive bills. They even came up with a wording that will determine the criminal act: "an inhuman lifestyle." Ivan Davydov tells about the reasons for such an concern of the Russian state specifically for the “feature”. It was a long time ago. So long ago that I don’t even want to remember how many years have passed.

Ivan Davydov - about Olga Elina’s book “Pictures from the exhibition: science and technology in the early USSR” The All-Russian agricultural and artisanal and industrial exhibition of 1923 was conceived as a breakthrough through post-war destruction into the world of science and technology. Having familiarized himself with the study on this exhibition, Ivan Davydov discusses the paradoxes of the Early Sovetest Project.

Ivan Davydov - about Olga Elina’s book “Pictures at an Exhibition: Science and Technology in the Early USSR” The All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft Exhibition of 1923 was conceived as a breakthrough through the post-war devastation into the world of science and technology. After reviewing the research dedicated to this exhibition, Ivan Davydov discusses the paradoxes of the early Soviet project.