by Tobias Thornes The representative of the Vietnamese travel company was most apologetic. ‘We could not get your ticket to Beijing,’ she said. ‘Only to Nanning. You can buy the Beijing ticket in Nanning. We will refund your Beijing ticket.’ So that was that. It was nine o’clock at night; the Nanning train would leave […]
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by Tobias Thornes Like a great, central artery, the Trans-Siberian Railway sweeps right across the vast expanse of Russia the giant. From Vladivostok in the East to Moscow in the West, through snowy plains and forested mountains, crossing countless streams with names unknown to travellers overwhelmed by so great a swiftly sweeping, vanishing array, it […]
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by Tobias Thornes Saint Petersburg was famously said to be the most ‘intentional’ city in the world. In some respects it has always resembled more symbol than settlement: the symbol of what its founder, Peter the Great, wanted his Russia to be in 1703; the symbol of an artificially Europeanised ‘western’ Russian culture under the […]
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by Kryssa Burakowski A phrase often used at the beginning of fairy tales in Russian is ‘в тридевятом царстве’. The closest marker used in English tales is probably ‘in a land far, far away’. This conveys the meaning, but understanding the Russian phrase literally is a little more problematic. Google seems to have been watching […]
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by Tobias Thornes A vast and varied wonderland of unimagined splendour. Such new, dramatic sights had few parallels on the pages of sweet, well-tempered Europe or sun-scorched North Africa’s well-thumbed manuscripts. It’s no wonder the dumbfounded explorers, stumbling upon this immense set of scenes unseen, this blank book far, far across the Western sea, called […]
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by Kryssa Burakowski «Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека, Бессмысленный и тусклый свет.» – “The night, the street, the lamp, the pharmacy, A senseless and dim light.” (The Russian sounds much better than my translation.) These are the opening lines to a short poem of October 1912 by Alexander Blok, a Petersburg poet of the Russian Silver […]
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The Poor Print 