Cossacks and Kobzars

[Moscow, Russia from June 2 - 23, 2014] I arrived in Moscow three weeks ago, settled into my cozy one-room apartment on the Taras Shevchenko Embankment (with wonderful fellow Harvard History Department comrades, Carolin Roeder and Marysia Blackwood), and survived the notoriously slow process of gaining access to Russian archival materials (shielded from the shock of toilet paper-less and soap-less archive bathrooms by prior warnings to bring my own supplies...)

Our daily commute across the Bogdan Khmelnitsky Bridge 
from the Taras Shevchenko Embankment 

Although I prefer the view from Reading Room #2 at "Leninka" (the Russian State Library) and cool breeze (literal and figurative) from the Kremlin... my work days are mostly spent in the joint reading room of GARF, the State Archive of the Russian Federation and RGAE, the Russian State Archive of the Economy. Here I have been reading the files of the Soviet Ministry of Water Management (thankfully more interesting that it sounds...)

The infamous "Leninka"

Slavophilism and the Arts and Crafts Movement
in Russia at Savva Mamontov's
Abramtsevo Artists' Colony

While I will be entering a bit less "charted" archival territory later in my trip, one of the benefits of working in Moscow is the amazing network of fellow historians and scholars. It seems that the GARF/RGAE reading room is the nexus of this network of new and old friends (that or the Khachapuri near our apartment...). I returned this evening from a weekend trip (while archives are closed) to the Artists' Colony at Abramtsevo, Sergiev Posad, and a wonderful night in a dacha near Radonezh with Marysia, Carolin, Kathryn and two friends from the history department at Berkeley (Rhiannon and Mirjam). Now I am transitioning back to work mode at our favorite "anti-cafe" in Moscow, Tsiferblat (Clockface Cafe, where we pay by the minute but enjoy free unlimited coffee, tea, and cookies).

Looking for "this meager nature"
at the Abramtsevo Artists' Colony
outside of Moscow

Twilight at 11 PM on Patriarshy Bridge
over the Moskva River, Moscow (above 55° N)

Kuindzhi, Night on the Dnieper, 1882 

(research trip to the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)

On my last full day in Moscow, I finally made it to the Tretyakov Gallery, for serious research purposes of course... While I could have spent many more hours wandering through rooms dedicated to Levitan, Savrasov, Shishkin, Maliavin, and Vrubel, I had come to see the paintings of the Dnieper River by Kuindzhi and was not disappointed.

Kuindzhi, The Dnieper in the Morning, 1881

(research trip to the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)