Seasoned Socialism

Description

Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women's central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Food, both in its quality and quantity, was a powerful tool in the Soviet Union. This collection features work by scholars in an array of fields including cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, history, and food studies, and the work gathered here explores the intersection of gender, food, and culture in the post-1960s Soviet context. From personal cookbooks to gulag survival strategies, Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women's journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.

Foreword / Darra Goldstein

Introduction: Food, Gender, and the Everyday through the Looking Glass of Socialist Experience / Anastasia Lakhtikova and Angela Brintlinger

I. Women in the Soviet Kitchen: Cooking Paradoxes in Family and Society

1. Love, Marry, Cook: Gendering the Home Kitchen in Late Soviet Russia / Adrianne K. Jacobs

2. "I hate cooking!": Emancipation and Patriarchy in Late Soviet Film / Irina Glushchenko, Translated by Angela Brintlinger and Anastasia Lakhtikova

3. Professional Women Cooking: Personal Soviet Cookbooks, Social Networks and Identity Building / Anastasia Lakhtikova

II. Producers, Providers and Consumers: Resistance and Compliance, Soviet-Style

4. Cake, Cabbage, and the Morality of Consumption in Iurii Trifonov's House on the Embankment / Benjamin Sutcliffe

5. Sated People: Gendered Modes of Acquiring and Consuming Prestigious Soviet Foods / Olena Stiazhkina

6. Dacha Labors: Preserving Everyday Soviet Life / Melissa L. Caldwell

7. Vodka en plein air: Authoritative Discourse, Alcohol, and Gendered Spaces in "Gray Mouse" by Vil' Lipatov / Lidiia Levkovitch

III. Soviet Signifiers: The Semiotics of Everyday Scarcity and Ritual Uses of Food

8. Cold Veal and a Stale Bread Roll: Zofia Wędrowska's Taste for Scarcity / Ksenia Gusarova

9. "Our only hope was in these plants": Irina Ratushinskaya and the Manipulation of Foodways in a Late Soviet Labor Camp / Ona Renner-Fahey

10: Shchi da kasha, but Mostly Shchi: Cabbage as Gendered and Genre'd in Late Soviet Prose / Angela Brintlinger

11. Still Life with Leftover Cutlet: Nonna Slepakova's Poetics of Time / Amelia Glaser

Afterword: Cultures of Food in the Era of Developed Socialism / Diane P. Koenker

Index

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Good Life
• Sociology
• Yury Trifonov
• Women's studies
• Dacha
• Social network
• Ethnography
• Eastern Europe
• Social sciences
• History of Europe
• Cooking
• Anthropology
• Gender studies

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 04 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253040985
• Langue: English

Extrait

SEASONED SOCIALISM
SEASONED SOCIALISM
Gender and Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life
Edited by
Anastasia Lakhtikova, Angela Brintlinger, and Irina Glushchenko
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04095-4 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04096-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04099-2 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
To the women-and men-for whom
late Socialism was more than just a period.
After all, it was also a life.
CONTENTS

Foreword / Darra Goldstein

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Food, Gender, and the Everyday through the Looking Glass of Socialist Experience / Anastasia Lakhtikova and Angela Brintlinger

I Women in the Soviet Kitchen: Cooking Paradoxes in Family and Society

1 Love, Marry, Cook: Gendering the Home Kitchen in Late Soviet Russia / Adrianne K. Jacobs

2 I Hate Cooking! : Emancipation and Patriarchy in Late Soviet Film / Irina Glushchenko, translated by Anastasia Lakhtikova and Angela Brintlinger

3 Professional Women Cooking: Soviet Manuscript Cookbooks, Social Networks, and Identity Building / Anastasia Lakhtikova

II Producers, Providers, and Consumers: Resistance and Compliance, Soviet-Style

4 Cake, Cabbage, and the Morality of Consumption in Iurii Trifonov s House on the Embankment / Benjamin Sutcliffe

5 Sated People: Gendered Modes of Acquiring and Consuming Prestigious Soviet Foods / Olena Stiazhkina, translated by Anastasia Lakhtikova and Angela Brintlinger

6 Dacha Labors: Preserving Everyday Soviet Life / Melissa L. Caldwell

7 Vodka en Plein Air : Authoritative Discourse, Alcohol, and Gendered Spaces in Gray Mouse by Vil Lipatov / Lidia Levkovitch

III Soviet Signifiers: The Semiotics of Everyday Scarcity and Ritual Uses of Food

8 Cold Veal and a Stale Bread Roll: Zofia W drowska s Taste for Scarcity / Ksenia Gusarova

9 Our Only Hope Was in These Plants : Irina Ratushinskaya and the Manipulation of Foodways in a Late Soviet Labor Camp / Ona Renner-Fahey

10 Shchi da kasha , but Mostly Shchi : Cabbage as Gendered and Genre d in the Late Soviet Period / Angela Brintlinger

11 Still Life with Leftovers: Nonna Slepakova s Poetics of Time / Amelia Glaser

Afterword: Cultures of Food in the Era of Developed Socialism / Diane P. Koenker

Bibliography

Index
FOREWORD
I N 1993 I PARTICIPATED IN A GROUNDBREAKING CONFERENCE on Food in Russian History and Culture at Harvard s Russian Research Center. Boris Yeltsin was president of the Russian Federation. The Soviet Union had only recently ceased to exist. It was a heady, anxious time-in that regard not unlike the present moment, when Russia is once again in the daily news and we contemplate the oddness of American-led sanctions inspiring an artisanal food movement in a country that for decades relied on the worst forms of industrial agriculture. Our conference papers ranged widely in their concerns, beginning with a look at food in the Primary Chronicle and ending with an exploration of late Soviet painting. I spoke on vegetarianism at the turn of the twentieth century and Natalya Nordman s wacky promotion of hay as the solution to Russia s endemic hunger. One of the conference organizers, Joyce Toomre, discussed the still-relevant topic of food and national identity in Armenia. Joyce had helped found the Culinary Historians of Boston, America s first culinary history group and a lifeline for me when I moved to western Massachusetts in 1983. Each month I religiously drove six hours round-trip to Boston to attend a lecture-the beginning of my formal education in the study of food.
The Culinary Historians had a profound effect on others, too, inspiring the formation of similar groups throughout the country. Explorations of food as a tool to understand culture and society-now recast as food studies-burgeoned, moving from the margins and the realm of avocation to become an established discipline in academia. And yet in the field of Slavic Studies, critical thinking about food has been slow to gain acceptance. This volume, then, is all the more welcome as evidence that Slavicists are now taking seriously the ways in which the study of food-its procurement, preparation, and consumption-can illuminate deeply held cultural and societal values.
Because so little work has been done in Slavic food studies, the possibilities for investigating the meanings and uses of food are nearly endless. Rather than presenting a mishmash of subjects, the editors of this volume have wisely chosen to limit its scope by focusing on food in relation to gender in the late Soviet period. As the essays reveal, many of the era s anxieties were expressed through various aspects of food and commensality. I would like to single out three of them here: the continual problem of scarcity (shortages and the famous deficit items); the desire for foods deemed luxurious and the prestige that accrued to obtaining them; and the creativity with which Soviet citizens approached provisioning and cooking.
What strikes me in reading these essays is that although they are expressly concerned with the period between 1964 and 1985, they in fact reveal long-standing societal problems and responses relating to food in Russia. As Adrianne Jacobs notes in the opening essay of this book, numerous Soviet-era cookbooks echoed (without irony) the title of Russia s most famous nineteenth-century cookbook, Elena Molokhovets s A Gift to Young Housewives , which espoused the wife s importance in safeguarding the home by nourishing the family both physically and spiritually. Despite revolution, government edicts, and experiments meant to liberate women from kitchen labor, this patriarchal notion of a woman s role in the household persisted throughout the Soviet period. In theorizing the relation between women and food, the feminist sociologist Marjorie DeVault has argued that food preparation is, in fact, the work that defines family; through feeding, women quite literally produce family life from day to day. 1 Here the difference between Western and Soviet life becomes apparent: while DeVault considers foodwork to be largely invisible as work , the Soviet woman s laborious efforts to get food on the table were highly visible, whether through the public act of standing in the ubiquitous queues for foodstuffs or in the preparations that took place in communal kitchens.
Scarcity
Due to Russia s geographic extremes and historically conservative agricultural practices, hunger and famine have defined Russian history from its beginnings. In the twentieth century, early Soviet political tactics coincided with natural disasters to produce some of the most horrific famines of all time, but the risk of hunger had always haunted Russian life. The Russian Orthodox Church s imposition of a strict regimen of feasting and fasting can be seen at least partly as a strategy for dealing with the cyclical patterns of hunger that the majority of Russians experienced in the course of the agricultural year. Fast days, on which the intake of meats and dairy products was restricted, marked up to half the year and were generally tied to the harvest. Thus, the highly stringent fasts preceding Easter (forty days of Great Lent plus Passion Week) overlaid the period of greatest hunger before the new crop of grain could be sown or the first shoots of wild greens appeared in spring. The less severe six-week Filippov Fast began on November 14, after the harvest had been taken in. 2
It is important to keep the condition of near-constant hunger in mind when reflecting on the Soviet years. In reaction to the dearth of produce and the grimness of everyday life, many of us tend to rhapsodize about the glories of pre-Revolutionary Russian haute cuisine. I confess that my first cookbook, la Russe , played up this dichotomy. 3 I wrote nostalgically about the abundance and refinement of aristocratic tables, taking my cue from Soviet friends who would offer apology for a scant dinner by ostensibly quoting from Molokhovets, transforming what they imagined as Gogolian excess into distinctively Soviet humor: If unexpected guests should arrive, descend to the larder and fetch from there a cold leg of veal. No punch line was needed. Everyone laughed heartily at the absurdity of having veal at hand, or even a larder, in the Soviet era.
What we sometimes fail to remember is that Molokhovets and her readers represented only a tiny, elite portion of the Russian populace. The reality for peasants was unremittingly bleak. Alexander Engel gardt, the chemist and former rector of St. Petersburg Agricultural Institute, was exiled in 1871 to his estate in Smolensk Province. In his letters From the Country, written for the journal Notes of the Fatherland , he describes the terrible hunger the peasants regularly endured and their practice of begging for crusts : they would travel from village to village asking for bread that they would then dry in thei