Curated playlist
Emigrants from the Russian Empire to France
- Igor StravinskyIgor Stravinsky once received a score back from his mentor in the mail, returned with a note reading: "Not delivered on account of death of addressee." That mentor was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the most powerful figure in Russian music, and…
- Joseph ConradJoseph Conrad did not speak English fluently until his twenties, and even then he spoke it with a strong foreign accent for the rest of his life. He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on the 3rd of December 1857, in Berdychiv, then…
- Marc ChagallMarc Chagall spent nearly a century alive on earth, and almost every one of those years was spent either fleeing something or painting it. Born Moishe Shagal in 1887 in a Jewish family near Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, he died in 1985…
- Vladimir NabokovVladimir Nabokov arrived in the United States in May 1940 aboard the SS Champlain, a Russian exile who spoke three languages and had already written nine novels that almost nobody in America had read. He was forty years old, nearly broke,…
- Sergei ProkofievSergei Prokofiev died on the 5th of March 1953 , the same day as Joseph Stalin. His coffin had to be carried by hand through the back streets of Moscow, away from the vast crowds mourning the dictator. About 30 people attended his funeral.…
- Wassily KandinskyWassily Kandinsky stood in his studio one day and stared at a painting on the wall for a long moment before realising it was his own work, hanging upside down. That disorienting pause, according to some art historians, cracked something…
- Peter KropotkinPeter Kropotkin was born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842, in the Konyushennaya district, which translates as the Equerries district. His father owned serfs in three provinces. His family descended from the princes of Smolensk. By the…
- Igor SikorskyIgor Sikorsky built a small rubber band-powered helicopter at age 12, long before the world had any reason to believe such machines could carry a person. That boyhood model, assembled in Kiev in the early 1900s, contained the seed of an…
- Natalia GoncharovaNatalia Goncharova was born on the 3rd of July 1881, the same year as Picasso and Fernand Leger, in the small village of Nagaevo in what is now the Chernsky District of Tula Oblast. That coincidence of birth years was no accident of fate.…
- Élie MetchnikoffÉlie Metchnikoff inserted tiny citrus thorns into the larvae of starfish and then waited. What he saw in 1882 would alter the course of medicine. Unusual cells had gathered around the thorns, surrounding them, as if mounting a defence.…
- Lev ShestovLev Shestov died in a Paris clinic on the 19th of November 1938, still writing. He was seventy-one years old and in the final weeks of his life had been studying Indian philosophy and the recent work of his friend Edmund Husserl. A…