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 winters. We were only there for a month at a time in the summer -- escaping our own academic jobs in the city -- and we found the company extremely congenial. Organic farmers, writers, handymen, a woman who worked in a used bookstore: all the members of the household were interesting in their own ways, and we spent many a happy evening slapping mosquitos on the back deck while we watched the sun set over the hill, ate sweet corn and grilled Japanese eggplant and cantaloupe and other fresh food we prepared for each other, and imagined other lives -- the original farmers who had built this house; the original "communards" with their politics, free love, and inevitable infighting; and ourselves, better somehow because living at a slow summertime pace.
Mornings we wrote, and I would bake bread from the various bulk flours I found in the kitchen -- white and whole wheat and rye and semolina, mixing up something different every day. By dinnertime, or sometimes lunchtime, the bread would be gone, consumed by us or by our friends. Afternoons we would hike, or go into town to the library, or head to the cooperative grocery store, or sometimes do a little work around the place -- chop some wood for the winter, or scrape and paint the old house. By late August we had painted most of the exterior bright Miami blue, and by the end of the day we had earned our sweet corn and beer.
At the Farm, I learned about cooperating with others, giving each other living space, helping out. I spent much of the summer telling and retelling a huge Polish novel I was reading to the three-year-old daughter of one of the couples. With Fire and Sword features a lot of what my audience really loved: "blood, and guts, and bones," she would repeat. Fighting and magic and vast landscapes: rivers, mountains, forests. That was almost 20 years ago now, and I can no longer quite remember the plot.
I guess I'm thinking about this because my politics were never quite right for the late Soviet era, and they are not feeling quite right now. My Russian friends were amazed when I showed them a picture of my first house, which I bought by myself in 1997, but they were more amazed that I left that house to live communally each summer. For me, the idea of making a meal for a group of people was incredibly attractive, in a way that cooking for myself never was, and the practice I got actually living with two small children was infinitely more instrumental in my decision to have children than all those many many hours of babysitting in college. But my Russian friends cherished their own plots of land out at the dacha, or the tiny two-room one family apartments which they achieved by means of elaborate trades in order to get out of their communal apartment situations.
When I was in college and in the early days of graduate school, I was fascinated with the first years of the Soviet experiment. Reading Alexandra Kollontai's frankly terrible novels and short stories, I imagined a world in which women really would have equal rights and the right to choose -- their work, their partners, their lives. But today when I shared Kollontai's speech to the female workers from 1920 with my students ["Women workers! The October Revolution has emancipated you! You have equal rights with men -- but life has not emancipated you! You are still slaves in the kitchen and in your own domestic sphere."], they did not even know the name. [You can hear Kollontai's speech about communism and the family here.]
None of it worked out, of course -- the zhenotdel [or women's section] was just a ruse to get Kollontai out of mainstream Communist political life. But the idea was brilliant.
Who wouldn't love to have meals prepared for them and eat communally, with co-workers and neighbors? It certainly seemed like a good idea. The "Factory-Kitchens" of the early Soviet era promised the economies of scale and effort that would "free" wives and women from their daily burdens of cooking and washing dishes.
The state never really delivered, and Russian women had to deal with their "double burden" throughout the Soviet era. Despite the difficulties of such a life, Russian culture has -- oddly enough -- remained conservative. In recent fiction I've been reading, I realized that the stories reiterate that the place of the woman is in the home: chopping and preserving vegetables for the winter.
That was more or less the lesson I "learned" in reading Lyudmila Ulitskaya's fantastic fairy tale "The Cabbage Miracle" -- women form families in various ways, and one way they do so is by preparing food for their loved ones. In the story, an old woman takes in two little orphaned girls after the war and then enlists their help in household chores. The girls know what is required of them -- sent out to purchase cabbage for the making of sauerkraut, they won't return until they manage to get some, regardless of the obstacles: terrible weather, a long wait, bad luck in the form of a hole in the pocket through which they lose the money. In the hungry autumn of 1945, they are excited to participate in the women's ritual of preserving food for the winter. Having a family, and being a part of the important task of getting and preparing food, is important, and the girls strive to earn the trust, and love, of the woman who has taken them in.
More surprising for me, perhaps, was Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's story "The Mother-Cabbage," which is essentially an anti-abortion tract disguised as a fairy tale. A woman abandoned by her husband chooses to end an early-term pregnancy ... but is eventually disciplined by a doctor and a bizarre hermit/monk, who chide her to undo her act: "Stupid woman! You knew how to sin, now know how to save yourself." So she "plants" the tiny child she has found in a cabbage sprout and allows the cabbage to grow until it produces a red-faced, crying newborn. Here too, a miracle: when she "picks" the newborn from the cabbage, her breasts fill with milk and she is able to feed the child.
We have come a long way since the mysteries of where babies come from and the myth of the cabbage patch child. But the link between food and family remains. For me personally, the nuclear family works. We now live in our own old farmhouse, with two children and two cats, like regular Americans. I love to cook in my big kitchen: chopping vegetables for soup, making pies and bread. Living communally requires the right people, and the right commitment of time and energy to make the community work. At this moment in our life, we don't have those things.
But sometimes I still wish there were more of us living here. The other Saturday I had visitors -- eleven for dinner, including a family of three and a family of five who actually spent the night, sprawled all over the guest room, the couches, the living room floor next to the wood stove. Only nine of us for breakfast, but still a good crowd. Exhausted though I was by generating those meals and washing those dishes, I was happy for the overflowing house.
And if it had been a communal situation, then as the cook, I wouldn't have needed to wash up. Someday maybe I'll go back to communal living. A girl can dream.
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 winters. We were only there for a month at a time in the summer -- escaping our own academic jobs in the city -- and we found the company extremely congenial. Organic farmers, writers, handymen, a woman who worked in a used bookstore: all the members of the household were interesting in their own ways, and we spent many a happy evening slapping mosquitos on the back deck while we watched the sun set over the hill, ate sweet corn and grilled Japanese eggplant and cantaloupe and other fresh food we prepared for each other, and imagined other lives -- the original farmers who had built this house; the original "communards" with their politics, free love, and inevitable infighting; and ourselves, better somehow because living at a slow summertime pace.
Mornings we wrote, and I would bake bread from the various bulk flours I found in the kitchen -- white and whole wheat and rye and semolina, mixing up something different every day. By dinnertime, or sometimes lunchtime, the bread would be gone, consumed by us or by our friends. Afternoons we would hike, or go into town to the library, or head to the cooperative grocery store, or sometimes do a little work around the place -- chop some wood for the winter, or scrape and paint the old house. By late August we had painted most of the exterior bright Miami blue, and by the end of the day we had earned our sweet corn and beer.
At the Farm, I learned about cooperating with others, giving each other living space, helping out. I spent much of the summer telling and retelling a huge Polish novel I was reading to the three-year-old daughter of one of the couples. With Fire and Sword features a lot of what my audience really loved: "blood, and guts, and bones," she would repeat. Fighting and magic and vast landscapes: rivers, mountains, forests. That was almost 20 years ago now, and I can no longer quite remember the plot.
I guess I'm thinking about this because my politics were never quite right for the late Soviet era, and they are not feeling quite right now. My Russian friends were amazed when I showed them a picture of my first house, which I bought by myself in 1997, but they were more amazed that I left that house to live communally each summer. For me, the idea of making a meal for a group of people was incredibly attractive, in a way that cooking for myself never was, and the practice I got actually living with two small children was infinitely more instrumental in my decision to have children than all those many many hours of babysitting in college. But my Russian friends cherished their own plots of land out at the dacha, or the tiny two-room one family apartments which they achieved by means of elaborate trades in order to get out of their communal apartment situations.
When I was in college and in the early days of graduate school, I was fascinated with the first years of the Soviet experiment. Reading Alexandra Kollontai's frankly terrible novels and short stories, I imagined a world in which women really would have equal rights and the right to choose -- their work, their partners, their lives. But today when I shared Kollontai's speech to the female workers from 1920 with my students ["Women workers! The October Revolution has emancipated you! You have equal rights with men -- but life has not emancipated you! You are still slaves in the kitchen and in your own domestic sphere."], they did not even know the name. [You can hear Kollontai's speech about communism and the family here.]
None of it worked out, of course -- the zhenotdel [or women's section] was just a ruse to get Kollontai out of mainstream Communist political life. But the idea was brilliant.
 |
| Great early Soviet poster: "We will serve every client with a smile." |
Who wouldn't love to have meals prepared for them and eat communally, with co-workers and neighbors? It certainly seemed like a good idea. The "Factory-Kitchens" of the early Soviet era promised the economies of scale and effort that would "free" wives and women from their daily burdens of cooking and washing dishes.
The state never really delivered, and Russian women had to deal with their "double burden" throughout the Soviet era. Despite the difficulties of such a life, Russian culture has -- oddly enough -- remained conservative. In recent fiction I've been reading, I realized that the stories reiterate that the place of the woman is in the home: chopping and preserving vegetables for the winter.
 |
| Cover of Ulitskaya's book "Childhood, 49" |
More surprising for me, perhaps, was Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's story "The Mother-Cabbage," which is essentially an anti-abortion tract disguised as a fairy tale. A woman abandoned by her husband chooses to end an early-term pregnancy ... but is eventually disciplined by a doctor and a bizarre hermit/monk, who chide her to undo her act: "Stupid woman! You knew how to sin, now know how to save yourself." So she "plants" the tiny child she has found in a cabbage sprout and allows the cabbage to grow until it produces a red-faced, crying newborn. Here too, a miracle: when she "picks" the newborn from the cabbage, her breasts fill with milk and she is able to feed the child.
 |
| French postcard of Cabbage Patch babies (1904). |
But sometimes I still wish there were more of us living here. The other Saturday I had visitors -- eleven for dinner, including a family of three and a family of five who actually spent the night, sprawled all over the guest room, the couches, the living room floor next to the wood stove. Only nine of us for breakfast, but still a good crowd. Exhausted though I was by generating those meals and washing those dishes, I was happy for the overflowing house.
And if it had been a communal situation, then as the cook, I wouldn't have needed to wash up. Someday maybe I'll go back to communal living. A girl can dream.
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