Tag: Cultural History
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Crimea in the Russian Empire: A Cultural History

Literature
Kievan Rus flourished from about 882 – when Prince Oleg moved the capital of the Rus from Novgorod to Kiev – until the 13th century, when the Mongol Empire invaded and destroyed their major cities. While Russia gradually threw off the ‘Mongol-Tatar Yoke’, and began to emerge round the city of Moscow as a powerful independent state, Kiev and...

The Scythians and The Rite of Spring

Art
Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (in French, Le Sacre du printemps) - the third ballet which Stravinsky composed for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, after The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911) - was written for the 1913 Paris season, and premiered just over a hundred years ago, on 29 May, in the newly-opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The centenary of this most...

Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce

James Joyce
With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis I (and as the first, we may do away with the numeral, and declare him simply Pope Francis), there is now but one word sitting upon and emanating breathlessly from the world's collective lips. The word is 'Jesuit', for Pope Francis is not...