Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and Russians by Tatyana Tolstaya

Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and Russians by Tatyana Tolstaya

Author:Tatyana Tolstaya [Tolstaya, Tatyana]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Politics, Writing, History
ISBN: 9780544080034
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2003-01-15T00:00:00+00:00


Joyce Toomre, who translated and published this insane historical monument, has accomplished an enormous task fully on a par with the original author’s slave labor. Her extensive preface and her detailed and entertaining notes are marvelous. Her grasp of history, both culinary and otherwise, is excellent, and she knows how to find the example that will vividly convey the cultural context, not just the recipe for a dish. (Thus, for example, you can’t help but appreciate the luxurious dinner for twenty-five people that Molokhovets proposes, if you know that a year’s worth of study in a women’s course four times a week cost less than one such dinner.)

However, Joyce Toomre, by her own acknowledgment, has singled out only one aspect of the book in following her main goal: to give convenient, practical directions to those who would like to prepare Russian dishes themselves. In other words, she decided to return Molokhovets’s book to its original use. And to do this, unfortunately she had to sacrifice a great deal: she chose only a quarter of the recipes for translation, discarding entire sections, entire groups of dishes, consciously sacrificing historicity to pragmatic goals. Her decision to destroy A Gift to Young Housewives as a historical monument and recreate it in another more convenient format is probably justified by many considerations: a practical book would be more likely to attract both publishers and readers. And in shortening Molokhovets’s tiresome wordiness (for some probably unfair reason, I have always imagined Molokhovets as a fat, rather thick-witted, humorless, spiritless glutton), Joyce Toomre didn’t allow the useful tips and techniques to entirely disappear but included some of them in the entertaining analysis that precedes the translation. The book is interesting and informative to read in translation; cooking with it is possible if not exactly convenient, and even simply turning the pages and looking at the illustrations is a pleasure. All the same, the living original has collapsed, perished irretrievably. Toomre herself knows the scale of the destruction she’s brought about; furthermore, she specifically draws our attention to it. I don’t want to be misunderstood—her conscientious, highly qualified work deserves endless respect. She killed with love.

But what can I do, how can I not heave a deep melancholy sigh, gazing upon the ruins? How to console oneself when, in the place of a sumptuous and absurd, scintillating and senseless edifice, there arises a neat, serviceable little standard house? Where are our shchi, cabbage soup, the basis of all Russian cooking? Of seven recipes for shchi, there’s only one here, and all the others are given in a list, like a memorial plaque (“Here so and so lived and died”). Why has meat okroshka been rejected, that classic cold soup made with kvass, served both in the Kremlin and in forgotten weed-infested villages? And cranberry kissel, which survived the tsars and Lenin and Gorbachev? Why, of forty-seven types of pirozhki, have only eleven been left; of twelve mousses, two; of fourteen kissels, five; of fifteen compotes, three? I



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