Manic Bookstore Cafe

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 ...

Last Friday we had our annual "Hongor Oulanoff Memorial Lecture in Russian Literature," the fifth in a series endowed by his widow Constance. I remember Professor Oulanoff, although he was already retired when I came to Ohio State. This lecturer, like others before her, managed to tie her own work to his by evoking Veniamin Kaverin's Two Captains , the USSR State Prize winning 1944 novel about an orphaned boy who becomes an arctic pilot. (I remember reading excerpts of this novel in college with my beloved Russian teacher, Albina Nikolaevna. Someday I too will be able to link my work to that of Prof. Oulanoff, since Kaverin was Yury Tynianov's brother-in-law twice over [they married each other's sister] and I am writing about Tynianov.) Our lecturer was Andrea Lanoux of Connecticut College. Her work on Soviet and post-Soviet children's literature tries to isolate questions of the role of children's literature in development and ideological indoctrinati...