It's that time of year. The semester is almost over, and everyone is desperate for spring (today is 75 degrees and windy, more snow expected on Monday). Our forsythia has given up trying to bloom.
But as I was preparing for a talk I gave this week in Missoula, Montana, I was reminded of my lark buns.
These traditional Russian buns can be made with milk and butter or according to the "lenten" recipe, with oil and water. Depending, of course, on whether spring is due before or after Orthodox Easter or, if you're just a regular American, on whether you are vegan.
It seemed appropriate to end my Missoula talk on Russian cookbooks and cuisine with this slide -- especially as I had been invited to campus by my PhD student (who coincidentally is actually vegan). It was such fun to stay with her family, to dine with my old grad school chums who happen to work at the University of Montana with her, and to meet many of her students and colleagues.
My former advisee, Ona, now an Associate Professor of Russian at UM, teaches a course on gender every couple of years. The students are all Russian majors and minors, with varying interests: history, politics, literature. All knew some Russian, some more than others. In the seminar I wanted to talk with them about the work I've been doing with Ulitskaya and Petrushevskaya (stories I wrote about here), but I was also intrigued to learn where they saw the nexus between gender and Russia.
One student is obsessed with Catherine. (I know her best from the "other" side, through the writings and life of the poet Gavriil Derzhavin, but these students read the memoirs of the great lady herself.) Another student loved The Cavalry Maiden, again because she likes memoirs and history. Many of the students plan to write their seminar papers on Petrushevskaya, so we spent quite a bit of time talking about her fairy tales.
I had recommended the students read Pushkin's fairy tale about the fisherman and the fish, but Ona assigned the Soviet cartoon instead (see above). What a great idea. In our discussion, we asked whether fairytales are inherently misogynistic or only when they are written by men. (Petrushevskaya, for one, does not cut her women characters a lot of slack.)
If it seems on first reading that the fisherman's wife is greedy -- wanting him to go back over and over to the magical fish, first for a new washtub to replace her old broken one, then for a better hut to live in, then for a nicer house, more power, etc etc until the fish takes everything away to punish her for her greed -- then we might try considering the story from the woman's point of view. The fisherman spent every day at sea, and came home to his wife, never thinking about how hard it was to wash clothes in a broken tub, or to keep the house nice when the roof leaked.
Perhaps if he had actually seen his old woman, tried to help out at home, or asked her about her priorities, then she wouldn't have needed to waste a wish on a broken washtub! Our discussion ranged from the cabbage patch to the wide blue sea, and I felt honored to have access to these wise and thoughtful students.
You know what they say: Teach a woman to fish and you can dine out on that every evening. Keep a woman down, and she may very well bake you vegan buns. Or maybe ... give a woman a PhD, and if you're lucky she will invite you to visit her in Missoula.
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| Жаворонки |
These traditional Russian buns can be made with milk and butter or according to the "lenten" recipe, with oil and water. Depending, of course, on whether spring is due before or after Orthodox Easter or, if you're just a regular American, on whether you are vegan.
It seemed appropriate to end my Missoula talk on Russian cookbooks and cuisine with this slide -- especially as I had been invited to campus by my PhD student (who coincidentally is actually vegan). It was such fun to stay with her family, to dine with my old grad school chums who happen to work at the University of Montana with her, and to meet many of her students and colleagues.
My former advisee, Ona, now an Associate Professor of Russian at UM, teaches a course on gender every couple of years. The students are all Russian majors and minors, with varying interests: history, politics, literature. All knew some Russian, some more than others. In the seminar I wanted to talk with them about the work I've been doing with Ulitskaya and Petrushevskaya (stories I wrote about here), but I was also intrigued to learn where they saw the nexus between gender and Russia.
One student is obsessed with Catherine. (I know her best from the "other" side, through the writings and life of the poet Gavriil Derzhavin, but these students read the memoirs of the great lady herself.) Another student loved The Cavalry Maiden, again because she likes memoirs and history. Many of the students plan to write their seminar papers on Petrushevskaya, so we spent quite a bit of time talking about her fairy tales.
If it seems on first reading that the fisherman's wife is greedy -- wanting him to go back over and over to the magical fish, first for a new washtub to replace her old broken one, then for a better hut to live in, then for a nicer house, more power, etc etc until the fish takes everything away to punish her for her greed -- then we might try considering the story from the woman's point of view. The fisherman spent every day at sea, and came home to his wife, never thinking about how hard it was to wash clothes in a broken tub, or to keep the house nice when the roof leaked.
Perhaps if he had actually seen his old woman, tried to help out at home, or asked her about her priorities, then she wouldn't have needed to waste a wish on a broken washtub! Our discussion ranged from the cabbage patch to the wide blue sea, and I felt honored to have access to these wise and thoughtful students.
You know what they say: Teach a woman to fish and you can dine out on that every evening. Keep a woman down, and she may very well bake you vegan buns. Or maybe ... give a woman a PhD, and if you're lucky she will invite you to visit her in Missoula.
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