A mid-18th-century watercolor depicts a Christian wedding ceremony in the kingdom of Kongo. A friar blesses a happy couple from underneath the veranda of an outdoor chapel. The bride and her attendants are wrapped and draped in colorful, imported textiles...
Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov is best known today for his 1859 novel “Oblomov,” an inventive satire of the waning Russian nobility, embodied in its title character, who is so sedentary and slothful that “Oblomovism” is still synonymous with “laziness.”...