Manic Bookstore Cafe

Last week I spent two days at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where my friend and colleague Catherine O'Neil leads a STARTALK program every summer. This government-supported language school runs four weeks, from 8:30-3:30 every day, and features fabulous language teachers from the Naval Academy. With a goal of 90% Russian language every day, the teachers have to be imaginative (after all, they don't take total beginners, but some of their students have had only a year of formal language training). They do exercises and readings, have conversations, play games and watch films (including Volodymyr Zelensky in Servant of the People , conveniently available on Netflix this summer). All in Russian. I also learned about their coffee break every morning, during which students have to go to the "cafe" and ask the grouchy post-Soviet barista (one of the fabulous instructors) for coffee, tea, or anything else they like. That seems brilliant--on the one hand the students...

It's been quite a rollercoaster of a spring semester. Russian Cuisine in Exile  is selling pretty well. It dawned on me to (Facebook) "friend" the surviving co-author, Alexander Genis, and then the son of the deceased co-author also friended me. Genis commented to me how ironic it felt that his (real) friends were still the main readers and purchasers of the book--this time Russians buying it for their own English-speaking friends. Konstantin Vail, who lives in New Jersey, wrote a super sweet thank you note to us for translating his father's book. Tom and I did a video interview in Boston at ASEEES, which the crack staff at Academic Studies Press edited up beautifully. I've also done a couple of interviews which will appear in print or have already online (see here , the U of Wisconsin CREECA interview with Larisa Doroshenko). And this morning--after spring semester, with my May term study abroad course starting in Budapest, Hungary tomorrow--I finally poste...

Check out the window, lower left. NOTE: THIS POST WAS WRITTEN IN MID-DECEMBER AND REMAINED IN DRAFT FORM. TIME TO RELEASE IT AND GET BACK TO BLOGGING. 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 p...

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 Re...

A few semesters ago, I had a student in my lit class. Call him Paul. Nice guy, somewhat engaged with the material, often enthusiastic about lectures and even class discussions, though when I asked a specific question, it usually turned out that he hadn't quite finished doing his reading for class. After twenty years of teaching, I don't remember all my students. But Paul sticks in my mind for a couple of reasons. First, he was just the kind of student I like to get in my general education classes -- a student who won't go on to major in literature or even the humanities necessarily, but who seems to enjoy being exposed to Russian literature. He learned something, and his world got a little bigger. That's what general education is all about. But there's another reason I remember Paul. It turned out that for him, the subject matter wasn't entirely new. Towards the end of the semester he told me: "I really love listening to you talk about Russia and R...

My students and I are working on a large translation project. We want to explore Petr Vail and Alexander Genis's 1987  Russian Cuisine in Exile  and try to bring it to an English-speaking audience. This is harder than you might think. I've taught sections of the book and written about it  before , but this time we are translating selected essays into English. The introduction already defies naming. Currently we are calling it "Expressions of the Soul," but the literal translation would be "Beautiful Gusts of the Soul." You see the problem. (Perhaps the title is playing on blagorodnye poryvy , noble impulses? Comments are welcome!) The book is typically Russian, in that it has many layers and is built on literary and cultural allusions. For example, at one point the authors begin to reminisce about what were frankly impoverished culinary conditions -- the kinds of things they bought at their university cafeteria: "36 kopek studen' [a kind of ...

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...

Vail and Genis's Russian Cuisine in Exile Teaching this course on Russian cuisine, my favorite book has become Petr Vail and Alexander Genis's Russian Cuisine in Exile . It's a wonderful set of essays that are part nostalgia, part recipe, part cultural commentary, part advice column ("If you want to buy a clay pot for stewing Russian soups, best to go to other immigrant shops -- African or Caribbean.") I'm quite sure they named the book after Gleb Struve's classic Russian Literature in Exile , but it is eminently more readable and inherently more fun. I couldn't help quoting Vail and Genis while making tea the other day for my students at our big Russian feast: "[The Russians'] habit of diluting tea with boiling water is a historical misconception. This custom arose from poverty and grew into a superstition according to which it is unhealthy to drink strong tea." The authors go on to explain that this is utterly preposterous, and t...

In my class, we have spent the last two weeks talking about shchi . We learned proverbs, looked at different recipes, contemplated "fasting" or vegetarian shchi versus shchi with meat. We read essays about shchi , discussed the history of shchi  in old Russia, and looked at images of shchi  in power point presentations. Or at least I did. Then one of the students -- whose Russian vocabulary seems extraordinary (she's the one who knew how to say "polar vortex" in Russian) -- asked a question. "What are shchi ?" I had decided to check in with the students about the pace of reading, degree of comprehension, etc., so we were speaking English. "Cabbage soup," I replied. "But then why is it plural?" This, of course, is the great question of Russian cuisine. Why is  a soup plural? The students were not convinced by my first suggestion: because the declensions are that much more fun: add some smetana  [sour cream] to your...