🇷🇺Take a look at the Moscow Kremlin’s Nikolskaya Tower - the way it looked more than a hundred years ago VS now - in our friends' post. Not much has changed!

Learn about Moscow's architecture in our amazing documentary, 'Moscow Neighbourhoods: 100 Years of History'.

📕 On November 3 (October 21 according to the old style) of 1895, in Odessa (Russian Empire), Eduard Georgievich Bagritsky was born, a poet and translator. According to his contemporaries, Bagritsky possessed legendary erudition, phenomenal memory, and extraordinary wit. He lived at the cusp of eras: World War I, the October Revolution, and the Civil War—events he witnessed firsthand.

Writer I.E. Babel spoke of the poet: “His love for justice, abundance, and joy, his love for resonant, intelligent words—this was his philosophy. It turned out to be the poetry of revolution.” Despite his romantic tendencies, Bagritsky’s poetry celebrates the construction of a new world. During the Civil War, he volunteered for the Red Army, writing agitational poems; later, working as a poet and artist at YUGROSTA in Odessa (the Southern Bureau of the Ukrainian branch of the Russian Telegraph Agency), he became the author of numerous leaflets, posters, and captions.

His childhood friend, writer L.I. Slavin, remarked about him: “Bagritsky is like his city—Odessa…” In 1925, the Bagritsky family moved to Kuntsevo near Moscow, renting half of an unassuming hut without amenities. It was in this humble dwelling that, in 1926, he wrote his most significant work, the poem *Thoughts about Opanas*—arguably the greatest creation of E.G. Bagritsky. The poem depicts Ukraine, exhausted by class strife—a majestic and tragic image. Its central theme revolves around the conflict between Opanas, a village youth dreaming of a quiet peasant life in liberated Ukraine, and the commissar Iosif Kogan, who defends the “supreme truth of the world revolution.” The poem is rich in colloquialisms and conversational speech. Bagritsky himself said about his work: “I wanted to craft it in the style of Ukrainian folk songs, like Taras Shevchenko did...” Later, based on this poem, Bagritsky composed the libretto for the opera *Thoughts about Opanas* for the State Musical Theater named after V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko. Contemporary witnesses fondly remember that the poet always recited his works with great pleasure.

#ThisDayInHistory@TCofRus