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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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The Third Heart (Potemkin), a novel by Yuri Buida (2008)
Rights sold: France – Gallimard, Russia - EKSMO
A short novel that narrates the improbable life of a Russian émigré in France and engages in polemical dialogue with the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov.
There was a time when nearly fifty thousand Russians lived in Paris (on the eve of World War I, they were hardly more than thirty-six thousand in all France). They prayed in Orthodox churches, sent their children to Russian schools, and discussed Dostoevsky in La Rotonde coffee shop.
Fyodor Zavalishin, also known as Theo, was one of those Russians who managed to escape the Bolshevik Revolution and settled in Paris. As many of them, he also visited a screening of Eisenstein's masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin in November 1926. As a soldier, in 1905 he took part in the suppression of the revolt in the Russian fleet. When he watched Eisenstein's impressive reconstruction of the massacre in the port of Odessa on the big screen, he suddenly felt guilt of being involved in this crime... Theo rushes to the nearest police station to make a confession, then tries to cure his remorse and guilt in a psychiatric hospital. There he learns from the newspapers a horrible story of seven women who were found murdered in a mass grave in Deauville. Without hesitation, Theo attributes the massacre to his former comrade in arms, badly disabled Ivan Domani, for whom he had just agreed to make erotic pictures of seven young creatures. Thus began a long Theo’s journey between violence and redemption ...
Buida’s The Third Heart is an amazing book that confirms more than ever that Yuri Bouida, who enjoys a great prestige in the country, occupies a prominent place in the great Russian literary tradition.
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