By JAMES POLCHIN [Writing in Public] – It takes a little over two and half hours to travel between London and Paris on the Eurostar. Racing between one 19th century capital to the other, I read Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (or its UK title of Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge). Solnit writes how the train, the telegraph, and even the camera forcefully annihilated time and space in the 19th century–and continues to today. The experience of reading Solinit’s book on the fast train to Paris, reminded me how space and time have so often been constructions that have been transformed and reimagined. In the 19th century, before the adoption of international time zones in 1883, there was more than an hour time difference between Paris and London. And, in one of history’s small ruptures, when England refused to adopt the pope-imposed Gregorian calendar in 1582 (a move to readjust the calender more closely to the cycles of the earth), the time difference between England and the rest of Europe grew gradually, until 1752 when there was an eleven day difference between London and Paris. Under a law passed in 1750, England adopted the Gregorian calendar (to much rioting and resistance across the country), and Wednesday, September 2nd, 1752 was followed by Thursday, September 14th.

Russian didn’t adopt this calendar until after the revolution in 1918, when Wednesday, January 31st was followed by Thursday, February 14th. The photos posted here come from a period just before Russia lost 13 days and its Tsarist empire.

Continued at Writing in Public | Photographs from Tsarist Russia: Big Picture at the Boston Globe | More Chronicle & Notices.