Some online newspapers place warnings about shocking content above images that can startle sensitive people. I should have hidden all the photos from my article under a content warning as well. Once you take a close look at the central…
I recently came across a discussion that took place in the pages of the literary criticism magazine The Explicator in 1944. Its subject was the poem “When the lamp is shattered” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Most of the experts characterized…
“Either I’m wrong, or The Queen of Spades is really a masterpiece,” Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky remarked in a letter to Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich. Unfortunately, I have no idea what he answered the composer. But if I were in his…
Monuments to world-renowned personalities – impressive cast figures, equestrian statues, or stelae with busts – are erected in city squares. The place that keeps the memory of less famous people is cemeteries. Wander around an old cemetery. You’ll see hundreds…
“No one feels another’s grief, no one understands another’s joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality, they only pass each other by”, said Franz Schubert said once. There is a bitter truth in his words, isn’t there?
The ballet we’ll watch today is known by two names – The Swan and The Dying Swan. The second title seems to be more expressive, and more accurate; nevertheless, it has failed to displace the first one. There are good…
“I died for beauty, but was scarce” conjures up pictures linked with the macabre physicality of death – the narrator is a decaying corpse. This poem should be frightening and unpleasant… It attracts, even comforts the reader though.
If you have been to an old cemetery, you have seen how cruel time is. Even the headstones which were placed a hundred years ago often seem half-destroyed: sad angels without heads sit on the cracked steles, names of the…