Friday/ all things Russian – Willem's Planet

Marc Chagall was a Belarusian-French artist. He died in 1985 at the age of 97. We should all take up art – it makes for a long life?

Alexander Pushkin is considered by many to be Russia’s greatest poet. But he only lived to 37; died in a duel (with swords, I assume) with a French officer that tried to seduce his wife.

It was said that one of the ceremony’s most enduring images for the audience was that of the glowing white troika of horses and chariot immortalized in Nikolai Gogol’s novel ‘Dead Souls’.

This scene must have been very impressive as well; modern technology enabled a football sized (or bigger?) image of a ship sailing across moving waves in the ocean to be displayed on six gigantic screens built into the ground surface. On the ‘deck’ of the ship there were 10 or 12 real human ‘sailors’. The ship sailed across the floor, and then in a clever move the sailors disappeared from sight by clambering into the black rectangle (a box or something like that) on the deck.

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