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“... Andrei Tarkovsky​ made his last two films, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice, in Italy and Sweden, and never returned to Russia. He died in Paris in 1986, aged 54. He was out of favour with the Soviet authorities then, later lionised as a master, and placed in the company of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, though his approach to film can seem antithetical to theirs ...”

“... The first film Andrei Tarkovsky shot outside the Soviet Union was Nostalghia – spelled that way because ‘nostalgia’ is too weak an equivalent for the Russian word, the Russian emotion. Made in Italy in 1982-83, it begins with a visit to the Tuscan church where Piero della Francesca painted his fresco of the pregnant Virgin Mary, the Madonna del Parto ...”

“... There is often, perhaps always, a science fiction strain in his work, informed by the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the fiction of Stanisław Lem and J.G. Ballard. Take his installation The Coral Reef, which won him a Turner Prize nomination in 2001: the visitor had to navigate a claustral labyrinth of 15 more or less grotty and unsettling ...”

“... and forbidden locus of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic (1972), filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker (1979). It’s an uncanny match with Serhii Plokhy’s first impression of Chernobyl as a tourist, thirty years after the explosion there in 1986. His young guide knows the site well enough, though the Soviet world of thirty years ...”

“... to suggest the presence of something unthinkable in this setting, a child. When filming Solaris Andrei Tarkovsky made a virtue of Soviet necessity, showing a scruffy spaceship with none of the pristine finish of 2001 – and gave audiences a jolt when a child suddenly scampered across their line of sight. The principle of the world-in-a-day novel is ...”

“... The film we have been seeing through these two hundred pages of Dyer’s memory and prose is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), a science fiction movie that doesn’t so much transcend the genre as pervert it, turn it over to the history of religion – or perhaps the history of doubt. The eyes belong to a girl described in the film as ‘a victim ...”

“... for breaking Institute rules. During his working sabbatical at the Institute, the string theorist Andrei Losev lived with his wife in a ‘Soviet apartment’ shared with another role-playing/vacationing/working physicist couple, their beds separated by a fragile screen. He later told the newspaper Kommersant what a late-night visit from the ‘secret ...”

“... aesthetics, they were quite distinct in terms of planning. As the reformed avant-garde architects Andrei Bunin and Mariia Kruglova put it in The Architectural Composition of the City (1940), it was thought possible in Russia at the time to use skyscrapers to make ‘striking vertical compositions’. The chaos of the Manhattan skyline, with its canyons and ...”