Moscow
capitol city of Russia
old Moscow
Moscow today
• For hundreds of years Moscow has been the center of the
Russian national culture.
• A great number of historic monuments are being
reconstructed and restored.
• Pedestrian zones are set up, new hotels, cafes and
restaurants are opened. Moscow regularly hosts major
festivals, Olympiads, sports competitions and various
international contests.
History of Moscow
webpage
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Moscow
• For most of its history, Russian architecture has been predominantly
religious. Churches were for centuries the only buildings to be
constructed of stone, and today they are almost the only buildings that
remain from its ancient past. The basic elements of Russian church
design emerged fairly early, around the eleventh century.
• The plan is generally that of a Greek cross (all four arms are equal),
and the walls are high and relatively free of openings. Sharply-sloped
roofs (tent roofs) and a multitude of domes cover the structure.
• The characteristic onion dome first appeared in Novgorod on the
Cathedral of Sancta Sophia, in the eleventh century. On the interior, the
primary feature is the iconostasis, an altar screen on which the church's
icons are mounted in a hierarchical fashion.
• After the 1917 Revolution, the Russian Avant-Garde leapt into the
service of the new Bolshevik regime. It seemed to promise just the sort
of break into a new world, and sweeping away of the old, that they had
been working for in art for years. They produced political posters,
organized street pageants and fairs, and, most notably, carried out the
design of the country's great public spaces for anniversary celebrations
of the Revolution.
• Caught up in the new regime's emphasis on the importance of industrial
power, they began to bring to composition a sense of the rationality and
technological focus of industrial work and design.
• Constructivism, as this style is known, continued to evolve into the late
1920s, when the conservatism of the Stalinist state renounced the
Avant-Garde in favor of Soviet Realism.
Vasilii Kandinskii (1866-1944)
Russisan composers:
Peter Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Serge Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky
• Cyrillic alphabet (Кириллица)Origin
• The Cyrillic alphabet is named after St. Cyril, a missionary
from Byzantium. It was invented sometime during the 10th
century AD, possibly by St. Kliment of Ohrid, to write the Old
Church Slavonic language.
• The Cyrillic alphabet achieved its current form in 1708 during
the reign of Peter the Great. Four letters were eliminated from
the alphabet in a 1917/18 reform.The Cyrillic alphabet has
been adapted to write over 50 different languages, mainly in
Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. In many cases
additional letters are used, some of which are adaptations of
standard Cyrillic letters, while others are taken from the Greek
or Latin alphabets.
Russian currency:
the ruble
1 Russian ruble = .034793 US $
Russian writers:
Vladimir Nabokov, Anton Chekov, Leo Tolstoi,
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn