The Public Domain Review

Walt Whitman’s influence on the creative output of 20th-century Russia — particularly in the years surrounding the 1917 Revolution — was enormous. For the 200th anniversary of Whitman's birth, Nina Murray looks at the translators through which Russians experienced his work, not only in a literary sense — through the efforts of Konstantin Balmont and Kornei Chukovsky — but also artistic, in the avant-garde printmaking of Vera Ermolaeva.

One of history's most idiosyncratic artist signatures, composed entirely of writhing creatures.

Feminist and novelist Alicia Little's intimate and unique insight into rural Chinese life at the end of the nineteenth century.

Understanding the same laws to apply to both visual and aural beauty, David Ramsay Hay thought it possible not only to analyse such visual wonders as the Parthenon in terms of music theory, but also to identify their corresponding musical harmonies and melodies. Carmel Raz on the Scottish artist’s original, idiosyncratic, and occasionally bewildering aesthetics.

Photographs of plants captured in extraordinary detail, as if under the microscope, frozen into new forms almost beyond recognition.

The philosopher's method for creating a personalized encyclopedia of quotations.

A year after Goethe’s tale of teenage angst and suicide came this satire giving it a Hollywood ending.

Hot on the heels of the French revolution — by way of extravagant orgies, obscure taxonomies, and lemonade seas — Charles Fourier offered up his blueprint for a socialist utopia, and in the process also one of the most influential early critiques of capitalism. Dominic Pettman explores Fourier’s radical, bizarre, and often astonishingly modern ideas, and how they might guide us in our own troubled times.

Version from Olive Kline and Elsie Baker of one of the most popular hymn's of all time.

Eugène Grasset's wonderful pictorial summation of his key ideas about natural forms and decorative motifs.