Curated category
Moscow State University alumni
- Anton ChekhovAnton Chekhov was born on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great in Taganrog, a commercial port city on the Sea of Azov, and he died on the 15th of July 1904…
- Lev VygotskyLev Vygotsky died on the 11th of June 1934, at the age of 37, leaving behind a final notebook entry that read: "This is the final thing I have done in…
- Mikhail GorbachevMikhail Gorbachev was born on the 2nd of March 1931 in Privolnoye, a village in the North Caucasus, into a peasant family so poor his parents had married as…
- 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…
- Ivan TurgenevIvan Turgenev had a brain that weighed 2,012 grams, one of the largest ever recorded. The man who carried it was tall and broad-shouldered, yet timid…
- Denis FonvizinDenis Ivanovich Fonvizin wrote comedies so sharp that lines from them became Russian proverbs. That is a rare distinction in any literature.
- Sergei YeseninSergei Yesenin was found dead on the 28th of December 1925 in his room at the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad. He was thirty years old.
- Andrei SakharovAndrei Sakharov was the man who built the Soviet Union's most devastating weapon and then spent the rest of his life trying to limit the damage it could do.
- Alexander HerzenAlexander Herzen was born in Moscow in 1812, just weeks before Napoleon's armies marched into the city. His very name was invented by his father, a rich…
- Pafnuty ChebyshevPafnuty Chebyshev limped through his entire life, leaning on a stick because of a condition called Trendelenburg's gait.
- Anatoly KhazanovAnatoly Mikhailovich Khazanov was born on the 13th of December 1937 in Moscow, into a world where official history was a controlled substance.
- 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…
- Alexander ZinovievAlexander Zinoviev was born on the 29th of October 1922 in a peasant village called Pakhtino, in the Kostroma Governorate of Russia.
- Aleksey Konstantinovich TolstoyCount Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy died on the 28th of September 1875 at his Krasny Rog estate, having administered a lethal dose of morphine to himself.
- Fyodor TyutchevFyodor Tyutchev wrote roughly 400 short poems across his entire life, yet he rarely bothered to write them down. When he did, he frequently lost the scraps…