Curated playlist
Writers from Moscow
- Bulat OkudzhavaBulat Okudzhava was born in Moscow on the 9th of May 1924, into a family that had traveled from Tbilisi to serve the Communist Party. His father held high rank. His uncle had tried to assassinate a governor. A cousin of sorts rode the…
- Andrei TarkovskyAndrei Tarkovsky was born on the 4th of April 1932 in the village of Zavrazhye, a small settlement in what is now the Kostroma Oblast of Russia. He would go on to direct just seven feature films in his lifetime. Yet Ingmar Bergman, one of…
- Andrei BelyAndrei Bely was born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev in Moscow, into a household where intellectual life was the air everyone breathed. His father, Nikolai Bugaev, was a mathematician regarded as a founder of the Moscow school of mathematics. His…
- Alexander PushkinAlexander Sergeyevich Pushkin could not speak Russian well until he was ten years old. The boy who would become the father of Russian literature grew up speaking mostly French, picking up his native tongue from household serfs and a…
- Mikhail LermontovMikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, born in Moscow on the 15th of October 1814. Russians sometimes called him the poet of the Caucasus. After Alexander Pushkin died in 1837, many regarded Lermontov…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Semyon FrankSemyon Lyudvigovich Frank was born in Russia on the 28th of January 1877. He entered the world within a Jewish family in Moscow. His father worked as a doctor but died when Semyon was still young. The boy grew up under the care of his…
- Boris PasternakBoris Leonidovich Pasternak grew up in a Moscow household where Leo Tolstoy visited, Sergei Rachmaninoff played piano, and train conductors stood at the kitchen door waiting to rush illustrations to a literary journal in St. Petersburg.…
- 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,…
- Ivan KrylovIvan Andreyevich Krylov did not discover his true calling until he was 40 years old. By then he had already tried his hand at comedy writing, journalism, civil service, and what legend described as years of wandering from town to town…
- Victor PelevinVictor Pelevin was born in Moscow on the 22nd of November 1962, the son of an English teacher and a military department instructor at Bauman University. He grew up on Tverskoy Boulevard, graduated from an elite high school with a special…
- Sergey MikhalkovSergey Mikhalkov wrote the words that hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens heard every morning, every sporting event, every state occasion for decades. He was, for most of his life, Russia's most beloved children's poet. Yet he was also…
- Vladimir VysotskyVladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky died on the 25th of July 1980, aged 42, in a Moscow apartment on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street, while his personal physician slept on the couch beside him. His neighbors had heard screaming through the walls for…
- Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher)Vladimir Solovyov was born in Moscow in 1853, the second son of one of Russia's most prominent historians, yet he spent his final days as what witnesses described as a homeless pauper, dying at a borrowed estate. Between those two points…