Good Novgorod Photos

Justin Wollf has been kind enough to give me some of his photos from our trip to Novgorod. I will not waste your time, I will merely post them in an a way carefully and artistically considered:

This one is so good I think it should be the cover of an album or something.



Here is my idea for the album:



(Beautiful)

On to more pictures though.

My friend Nikolai and I talking on the bridge by a Novgord park:



And finally a view inside the St. Sophia monastery shown in my previous post:



Definately one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever been in.

Since the trip we have mostly been busy with homework. Our Russian Literature teacher assigned us about 240 or so pages for the week. Part of that reading was the poetically written novel by Pushkin about a man named Evgeny Onegin who politely rejects the advances of a passionate, naive, and innocent country girl. I won't give away too much of the plot, but it did present many interesting insights about Russian life--our literature teacher even mentioned that it has been called an encyclopedia of Russian life by a modern scholar.

On Monday of this week we also got to read the Pushkin poem entitled "The Bronze Horseman" directly in front of the statue that was being described in the work. It was amazing to have literature be alive in such a vivid fashion in front of me. It is easy to forget the historical and social implications of literature and view it solely as a dialogue between author and audience. Reading the poem in front of the statue brought to life the importance of the context.

We got to experience another Russian art class in the Museum of Russian Ethnography. The museum contains works of Russian artists and we got the chance to see famous paintings such as Aivazovsky's Ninth Wave and the Repin's Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. The Wikipedia article doesn't do them any justice, as they are the size of an entire wall and painted in incredible detail. Next class we get to return to the museum to view some impressionist and avante guarde art.

That's it for now. Going to a Tchaikovsky opera tonight, and possibly eating at KFC beforehand--how cultured...