Manic Bookstore Cafe

On Tuesday, April 15, it snowed. Needless to say, this plunged many of my students, coworkers, and family members into despair. Never mind that spring has  to come some time -- they remained convinced that the winter would never end. So I decided to pull out all the stops. Oddly, this week has been Passover as well as Easter Week for both Orthodox and other Christians. Can't remember the last time that happened. For Russians, this should mean the last week of "fasting" foods, i.e. foods without animal products. I went to one of my Russian recipe go-to sites, gotovim-doma.ru, to find a recipe for the lark-shaped breads that are guaranteed to usher in spring weather. On Wednesday, I baked twenty  zhavoronki . (I meant to take pictures, but apparently did not.) The dough was a "fasting" dough, i.e. used water, yeast and flour, but no eggs or milk, and was phenomenally easy to manipulate into little birds. Just doing my part to make spring arrive -- and now i...

About a month ago my students were giving presentations of their own research. They chose excellent topics: Russian holidays, and the foods that accompany them; French influences on Russian cuisine (and vice versa); traditions of tea drinking; feasting and fasting; the Leningrad blockade. Boris Kustodiev, "Merchant's Wife," 1918 The visuals were terrific as well. From the serious (images of the bread rations during the siege of Leningrad) to the informative (a diagram of the different parts of a samovar) to the gorgeous (Kustodiev's tea drinking merchant's wife -- everyone's favorite "edible" feast). I am not the first to comment on the merchant's wife's shoulders or to notice that they are as appetizing as the ripe red watermelon or the puffy white clouds in that blue blue sky. (Why, I wonder, is this his most famous painting? Is it the accoutrements à la Russe such as the brass samovar? or the obviously satisfied wife, who has ever...

Not surprising, really, that "communal" aspects of life in the Soviet Union did not resemble my own communal experience in Western Mass. For Americans in the 60s and beyond, communal households meant working out shared responsibilities, meeting to discuss problems and disagreements, voting on who gets to move in and who doesn't. Those who remember the "Housing Committee" in Bulgakov's novella Heart of a Dog  (1920s, first published 1987!) know that the ideal American situation -- rational people, working together deliberately to make a life together -- was not the Soviet experience. From the film "Heart of a Dog": the Housing Committee, Shvonder and Co. Instead, uplotnenie --  literally consolidation or compression -- happened by decree, not by choice. People who had "too much" living space received "neighbors," packed into their former living rooms, dining rooms, etc. I like the Oxford dictionary definition of uplotnen...

When I was younger, I lived in a commune. Only briefly, and only part time, but the experience was life-changing. And somehow destiny -- since I chose Russian as my profession, and since my politics have always leaned left, it was almost inevitable that I embrace collective living at some point. The commune we lived in was quite famous, located in the so-called Happy Valley of Western Massachusetts. Founded by a group of radicals escaping New York City some thirty years earlier, the commune occupied a 19th century farmhouse perched on a hill, with its requisite old barn looming across the dead end road. Inside the house each section was heated with its own wood stove and occupied by members of the commune: a single guy, a woman, two couples, a family, plus a dog, two cats, and at least one guinea pig. The kitchen featured a long trestle table and an enormous "Russian stove." No one cooked in it, but it did heat that portion of the house thoroughly during cold New England...