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Russian Cuisine in Exile ... coming to a bookstore near you

This has been an exciting week for me on the publishing front. Academic Studies Press sent out marketing postcards for our book, which is coming out in about a month.

The cover of the new book. Note the cool design elements!

I have read and loved this book for thirty years, and I've been working with one or another version of the essays with students for almost five. Now the full translation of Russian Cuisine in Exile will finally offer English-speaking audiences a chance to explore these forty-four essays (with recipes) for themselves.

Original Cover
In 1987 Pyotr Vail and Alexander Genis collected their columns into a little book. Russian Cuisine in Exile for me evokes Russian Literature in Exile (Русская литература в изгнании), a book by Prof. Gleb Struve originally published in 1956 (and never translated into English, to my knowledge). Struve, who by that time was faculty at Berkeley, was a part of the first-wave of emigration after the Russian Revolution who received (like Nabokov) his degree at a British university (in his case Oxford), and then kicked around France and Germany until ending up in the U.S. (like Nabokov, I guess).

My well-loved copy
of How We Write
My own introduction to Vail and Genis came in the Vermont warehouse of Valery Chalidze. Chalidze was a Soviet physicist and human rights activist who was deprived of his citizenship while on a trip to the U.S. in 1972 and subsequently settled here. In 1985 he received a MacArthur Foundation genius grant and my guess is that he plowed some of that money into his publishing ventures. When I was fortunate enough to visit him in the summer of 1988, he let me loose in the warehouse, showing me books that he had written, compiled, published, or reprinted--many of which he intended to have smuggled back into the Soviet Union, a heroic effort to subvert Soviet censorship practices from afar. He told me to take any books I wanted. Chalidze passed away this year (here's a link to his Washington Post obituary), but I still remember his no-nonsense paperback covers on books I came to treasure.

Including Russian Cuisine in Exile. I would love to know the history of his republishing this book, which had only come out in Los Angeles one year earlier. I assume it was the cheeky tone and anti-nostalgic musings on the motherland and Soviet cuisine that captivated him. Jousting with official Soviet culture at a distance was hard work, and it's nice to think of him embracing Vail and Genis as his comrades in the task. I am still grateful that Chalidze introduced me to the book.

Vail and Genis wrote Russian Cuisine in Exile with one voice. Indeed, they wrote many pieces together, including articles for the newspaper they and Dovlatov founded, The New American (Новый американец). (They, along with Dovlatov, probably penned the funny slogan for their paper, pictured here. The New American"We chose freedom, and now our happiness is in our own hands."

Publishing a weekly newspaper for the Russian-speaking community in New York and beyond was quite an endeavor, and it lasted just over two years. It's fun to imagine the collective--young, energetic, idealistic emigres, some even exiles, who left the Soviet experiment to embark upon one of their own. 

The 1-year anniversary of The New American.
Photo taken in Brighton Beach.
The cuisine project was a grandiose one, too, about more than food or even nostalgia. Vail and Genis were making their mark on Russian emigre culture in the United States at a moment when the chill of the Cold War had yet to dissipate. As Genis explains in the interview we publish at the end of our book:
First-wave emigres had a popular saying: “We are not in exile, we are on a mission.” That’s why we particularly liked the heading Ksana Blank (Dovlatov’s half-sister) thought up for us: “Russian Cuisine in Exile.” The title belongs to her. We were trying to reduce the pathos that reigned in the Russian community abroad. In our struggle with the “savage seriousness” (in Aksyonov’s words) of émigré rhetoric, we crafted our culinary columns to be both parodic and practical. Every dish was tested at literary dinners to which we treated virtually every writer of the third wave. Except—it goes without saying—Solzhenitsyn, who really did believe he was on a mission.
Parodic and practical. Getting that tone across in English was no easy task.

But in the twenty-first century, we are living in a new world, a world of migration and movement, of communities struggling to maintain their heritage while sometimes also striving not to take it too seriously, trying to find a place for themselves in new environments and to bridge gaps to meet those who already live there.

I've taught pieces of the book in English and in Russian, and written about it on this blog. (Search Russian Cuisine in Exile). Tom Feerick, my co-translator, originally studied the book with me in class, and our partnership--like Vail and Genis's, I imagine--was a back and forth negotiation all the way through.

Now is the perfect time for this little book to find new audiences in English-speaking places across the world. We hope our readers will agree.


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