Curated playlist
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 at the age of forty-four -- the same disease that had killed his brother claiming…
- 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 psychology - and I will like Moses, die at the summit, having glimpsed the promised land…
- 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 teenagers and lived in an adobe-walled hut belonging to his grandfather. He died…
- 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…
- 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, restrained, and soft-spoken. He was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet,…
- Denis FonvizinDenis Ivanovich Fonvizin wrote comedies so sharp that lines from them became Russian proverbs. That is a rare distinction in any literature. He was born in Moscow into a noble Orthodox family, the first of eight children, and he would go…
- 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. The day before, he had cut his wrist and used his own blood to write a farewell poem. That poem,…
- 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. Born in Moscow on the 21st of May 1921, he grew up in a household shaped by…
- 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 Russian landowner named Ivan Yakovlev, who derived it from the German word Herz,…
- Pafnuty ChebyshevPafnuty Chebyshev limped through his entire life, leaning on a stick because of a condition called Trendelenburg's gait. As a child in the village of Okatovo, in the province of Kaluga, that limp kept him off the playing fields where other…
- Anatoly KhazanovAnatoly Mikhailovich Khazanov was born on the 13th of December 1937 in Moscow, into a world where official history was a controlled substance. The Soviet state had its own version of how civilizations rise and fall, and that version was…
- 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…
- Alexander ZinovievAlexander Zinoviev was born on the 29th of October 1922 in a peasant village called Pakhtino, in the Kostroma Governorate of Russia. He died on the 10th of May 2006, having lived long enough to watch the country he raged against for…
- 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. He left behind a trilogy of historical dramas, a body of lyric poetry that…
- 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 of paper they were scribbled on. He called them bagatelles, trifles not worth…