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Wednesday night we did our first public reading of Russian Cuisine in Exile in Milwaukee. Tom Feerick -- formerly my undergraduate student, now a second year grad student at Northwestern -- drove up from Evanston, while I drove over and up from my dad's house in Barrington. (On Thursday we met in Hyde Park for round two.)
In brief, translators on tour.
What can I say? It was terrific fun. We were in "dialogue" with Joe Peschio, the brilliant and funny Russian prof at UW-Milwaukee who helped set up the event. Boswell Books is fantastic -- a large space with really well-curated offerings. I will make it a destination in future for stocking up for my own library and for gifts. The manager, Daniel, was gracious and sweet, and the audience settled right into comfy chairs and sofas to listen to us chat.
As we were preparing for the reading, Tom and I were thinking about the tone of the authors and how it will play with an American audience, now that this book will finally find an American audience. To Tom's ear the 1980s rhetoric sounds somewhat misogynistic. It's not, I don't think, and I think I can demonstrate my point. I want to use the chapter on cabbage soup.
Pyotr Vail and Alexander Genis write, "Russia has the greatest repertoire of soups in the world" ... and the greatest of these is shchi. Shchi is the quintessential Russian soup. On one hand, there's no wonder. Shchi contains within it many positive qualities of Russian cooking. It includes the simplest of ingredients: cabbage, mushrooms, onion, carrot, turnip, herbs, sour cream. (William Pokhlebkin, famed and grouchy Russian food writer, claimed that shchi demonstrates Russian openness and flexibility, since a number of the ingredients came from abroad.)
And ideally shchi is made in a clay pot, braised and stewed all day long, slowly, in a Russian stove. In describing how to make a quick vegetable soup, Vail and Genis remind us "with shchi you have to start first thing in the morning, right after your wife leaves for work."
In that phrase we see Russian (literary) history and Russian (emigre) life. First, the history.
The 18th century Russian poet Gavriil Derzhavin famously avoided marrying a fellow writer, Ekaterina Urusova, by saying "the husband writes poetry, the wife writes poetry, and who will make the shchi?" (As if any 18th century noblewoman made her own shchi...) So working women are a bad thing ... unless the man steps up to the stove in her absence.
What for Americans might read as bordering on misogyny -- or perhaps simply male chauvinism -- seems to me to be closer to self-irony. There are several chapters in Russian Cuisine in Exile that mention women's ambitions, women's hatred of the kitchen (see "Borscht with a Side of Emancipation"), women's hobbies. But in the chapter about shchi there's a hidden bitterness to it. The wives work outside the home, and the men can monitor the slowly stewing shchi.
As with any memoir or literary work of any kind, we should not read this as biographical fact. When the authors claim in the chapter "Running with the Sheep": "Now we’ve gotten what we wanted from the lamb: exoticism and tenderness. If we could just get the same from our wives…" we read this as a punch line, not a confession of marital woe.
Americans think of borscht as the quintessential Russian soup, but they are mistaken. It is shchi that connects directly to Russianness, to the very essence of what it means to be Russian. Indeed, the chapter in Russian Cuisine about shchi is called "The Scent of Cabbage Soup," and in it the authors evoke the Ur-Poet for Russia, Alexander Pushkin. "After all," they write," as the great poet said: 'Here's the Russian spirit! Here it smells of shchi!" (I'm sure I don't need to specify, though we do in our commentary, that Pushkin said no such thing.)
Generally speaking shchi is the simplest of Russian meals, and even so, Pushkin felt compelled to comment on it as his brilliant novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin came to a close:
Мой идеал теперь — хозяйка.
Мои желания — покой,
Да щей горшок, да сам большой.
My ideal is now a housewife,
All I desire is peace and quiet,
A pot of cabbage soup, a proud toddler.
That ideal really does sound lovely, and it demonstrates an attitude toward (Russian) life that is surprisingly simple.
But then, Russians love things to be uncomplicated (though they rarely are). A
favorite Russian aphorism about the simple things in life goes: Щи да каша, пища наша (Shchi and porridge are our
daily bread).
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| Author talks at Boswell |
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