The Byzantine authors just imitated the classical ones, without creating anything original. Their literature is a crooked mirror, where you can’t get to the facts through parables. The Christian Empire had no sense of humour; each text was a theological preachment. We refute these and other stereotypes in a new episode of our podcast — […]

How did philosophy and religion meet in Byzantium? How did ancient ideas about beauty and virtue flow into Christian ethics? And how did Socratic “trolling” become the ground for heresies? A new video on the musicAeterna digital platform features a lecture on “meetings at highest level” in the intellectual life of the Eastern Roman Empire, […]

How do words and music meet in the works of Paul Celan? What do modern readers and artists find in the strikingly complex and succinct texts born at the cutting edge of the 20th century tragedies? These and other topics are covered in a talk of the composer and Dom Radio resident Alexey Retinsky with […]

How does Tchaikovsky’s music influence the way contemporary composers think? Vladimir Rannev, Alexander Knaifel, Sergey Nevsky and Oleg Gudachev talk about the powerful innovation and non-obvious borrowings, which over the centuries have resulted in real discoveries. Concluding the anniversary year, we suggest to watch the November meeting in Dom Radio on the living energy of […]

An experience got through shock, a beauty seen through pain… How does a person explain their complicated relationship with art through the concepts of “pathos” and “pathetic”? In a new episode of our podcast, we trace the evolution of two categories through the centuries, from the Homeric epics to Tchaikovsky’s lyricism, from the works of […]

From the “wildest Russian nihilism” to the unfading classics. In a new episode of our podcast, we share a lecture on the history of the Violin Concerto in D major by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, its performance and interpretation. In view of the composer’s 180th anniversary, it is the right time to look at the evolution […]