Today, 31.03.2024, is 57 years since my parents got married.
The photos in this post are amateur snaps capturing my parents’ two summers in the mid-1960s. Future engineers and students of Moscow Power Engineering Institute, they built electricity lines in remote rural areas of Central Russia. Looking at the photos now, I envy them. The mid-1960s seemed like a good time to be twenty.
What Is Russia Thinking?
Here, I would like to save the two articles, from New York Times, Feb 15, 2023 and from FT, Jan 7, 2023, about the documentary opera “Russia : Today”. My daughter Tonya Wechsler is the producer of this project.
If only Gogol knew…
The Russian version of this post gives more details of my leap to Porto from Moscow but does not cover recent events. Writing this on the last day of May 2022, I add many pictures hoping they help me tell the story.
Who did not come? Who of us is not here?
This post is to share my impressions from meeting with my school friends in May as well as thoughts shaped by the online Group Relations Conference in June (led by...
April 2021
In April I went to see a documentary closing the ArtDocFest festival and to a couple of photo exhibitions. I participated in the online conference “Walls – Open, Closed, Sliding? The Virus, Europe and Our World Today” and in a rally organised to support imprisoned politician Alexey Navalny on the 21st. My virtual round of applause goes to Nikolai Formozov, a Russian biologist and environmentalist, who went on hunger strike in solidarity with Alexey, and to my friend Angelika from Heidelberg. Angelika says she and her husband find it inappropriate to travel to palm tree resorts when millions around the world get neither travel nor covid19 vaccine. I am also sharing translations of a couple of posts from social media. In the first one, a medical doctor Fedor Katassonov explains his reasons to join the April 21st rally. In the second one Dmitry Bykov, poet, novelist, lecturer and political activist talks about the Soviet space project and reckons that 60 years ago the world was a better place.
Angels Against Demons
This is a post about peaceful civic initiatives of winter 2021 in Saint-Petersburg and Moscow, and about an exhibition of seventeenth-century frescoes saved in the 1930s from the destructive violence of state power.
Kaliningrad, January 2021
This was my dream three years ago, in 2018: a house on a hill overlooking the sea, I am feeling a warm breeze and the sun on my face. A...
2020
Illness In December 2020 I had covid-19. In November my parents had it. Fortunately, they got over it alright. “May the sun always shine”, as we sang such as children,...
The Importance of Not Being Serious
Leonid “Liolya” Schwartzmann, Russian animator and painter, turned 100 this year. Organist and composer Ekaterina Melnikova talks about Schwartsmann’s drawings for children’s concert “Katya in the Magic Land”. The master’s...
Ekaterina Melnikova’s new music, summer 2020
The autumn finds me in Moscow. To misquote “Alice in Wonderland”, I thought this would never happen, and now here I am. However, it is good to be with friends...
