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The Prussian Bride, collected stories by Yuri Buida (1998)
Rights are handled on behalf of Editions Gallimard
Rights sold: Estonia - Loomingu Raamat, France – Gallimard, Hungary – Kalligram, Poland – Czytelnik, Russia - NLO, EKSMO, AST, Slovakia – Kalligram, Spain - AUTOMATICA, UK/US – Dedalus
Apollon Grigoriev Prize 1999
Rossica Translation Prize 2005 (translation by Oliver Ready)
The Prussian Bride, unfolds a strange hodge podge of blunt fiction and fantastical hallucination. The action in the thirty short stories of the collection takes place in the area of Kaliningrad, where the writer was born back in 1954. The writer depicts the daily life of forlorn, mortified, alcoholic or sick locals who are haunted by the fantasy of a lost paradise. Dark and tragic accounts sliding along from rational to imaginary.
Each of Yuri Buida’s short stories gathered here explore the territory between the Vistula and Niemen which once used to be eastern Prussia. The myth of a glorious past left its marks in the Kaliningrad area, he former Königsberg, but its inhabitants’ daily life is cold, dark and violent. Material and emotial misery is rampant, and violence is not only physical. The tone of this anthology, dedicated to the memory of a territory is absolutely tragic. Several recurring characters appear in this collection of thirty short stories, so that it can almost read like a novel. It definitely brings to mind the romanticism of E.T.A Hoffman, sprinkled with Russian excessiveness. “Chapters” in Buida’s novel display a wide variety of genres and styles, from fantasy and the grotesque to a stern (even cruel) realism. The author demonstrates plot ingenuity and a masterful use of shock effects.
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High Society Dinners: Dining in Tsarist Russia by Yuri Lotman and Jelena Pogosjan (NF)
Rights sold: Estonia - TANAPAEV, World English rights – PROSPECT BOOKS
Many writers and researchers around the world now write prodigiously on the topic that engages all of us several times a day: food. And its history. It used to be that those of us interested in the history of food found the pickings pretty slim. Yuri Lotman and Jelena Pogosjan's High Society Dinners: Dining in Tsarist Russia deserves a wide readership among scholars and researchers and writers currently working on food- and culinary-related subjects, as well as curious general readers.
High Society Dinners, originally published posthumously in Russian in 1996 – Yuri Lotman having died in 1993 – technically consists of a number of menus for meals served at the opulent house of Petr Pavlovich Durnovo – Adjutant-General of the Tsar's Imperial Suite – during the period ranging from the spring of 1857 through 1858. Durnovo included diary-like comments with most of these menus, making the material an even richer source. Lotman devotes over 116 pages to a description of Russian cuisine it history, the background to the menus, and social structure and mores. He consistently references Russian literature as a source for culinary comments and digressed on French cuisine – highly important at the time among the Russian noble class. And, in addition, he relies on Ekaterina Avdeeva's 1842 cookbook, The Experienced Russian Housewife's Handbook.
The menus themselves would be useful enough for what they reveal about culinary culture in Russia, but Yuri Lotman's commentary is invaluable, dissecting the dining rituals and social circles of the participants. Durnovo's menus and guest lists, interspersed with extracts from family letters and the leading newspapers and journals of the day, set in context the domestic and gastronomic underpinnings of life in this group at the heart of the Russian empire.
High Society Dinners offers extraordinary insight into the domestic arrangements of the Russian aristocracy. It opens up a window onto a historical period of great interest via detailed primary material not normally associated with food and culinary matters.
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