Reading This Tuesday: New Russian Fiction!

Come hear it for yourselves, for free, in Russian and English: CEC ArtsLink and Tin House Books are launching a new, bilingual volume called Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia. Finally, we're beyond "post-Soviet"! Authors and translators will read with their own lips! Reception! Tuesday, September 22, at 7pm. You can read more about this and related events here, and even RSVP on facebook to ensure they order enough zakuski for the reception.

More Beautiful Women at the Samovar!

These women refused to be identified by name, because they were having Too Much Fun on Ladies' Night Out. Same goes for the lovely lass celebrating her birthday. She hadn't counted on Tort po-Kievsky and a rousing table-side birthday song! Note the photo in the background, in which founders Joseph Brodsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov seem happy to join in celebrating. By the end of the evening, everyone spoke flawless Russian.

But what about the food, you ask?

Recently, I tried to wrest from Roman Kaplan the Samovar's recipe for the delicious beet soup spelled in our pathetic Latin letters variously as borsht, borshcht, borscht, or really however you want, but economically lettered in Russian as борщ. O, борщ! Your color so deeply pink, your taste so rich and hearty in winter, so refreshing in summer! You vary seasonally, you are endlessly attractive, you can be eaten (in Russia) or drunk (in America) hot or cold. Борщ, you are an ethnographic history of central and eastern Europe and Asia—from our family recipe we can trace (forgive the pun) our roots.

Roman was—there is no better word—cagey. Lynn Visson's The Russian Heritage Cookbook: A Culinary Heritage Preserved in 360 Authentic Recipes, newly updated and republished in 2009, happened to be lying on the table. He picked it up and said, «Sometimes we use this one.» I looked. There were several pages of recipes. I glanced over them and picked one out. «This one?» He looked. «Yes,» he replied. «But we don't use meat…we make our own stock, from beef…no celery…potatoes, yes…» And so on.

I'll keep trying, folks. And in the meantime you can't go wrong with Visson's truly authentic recipes—a lifetime of experience and research has gone into the making of that book. Or try Please to the Table, a delightful literary and gastronomical exploration of recipes from across the former Soviet Union. For the Samovar's own recipe, we may ultimately have to content ourselves with having the борщ onsite. But Roman did promise to share some vodka recipes soon…

Clearly, the poison was not in the glass in front of him!

If you remember William Goldman's classic fairytale film, The Princess Bride, you will recognize here (photo copyright by Alexander Izbitser) the multi-talented Wallace Shawn, who played the lovable and ill-fated villain Vizzini. Vizzini lost the duel of wits with the masked hero over a poisoned glass of wine. At the Samovar the other night, Shawn appears to have chosen the correct glass, with the result that the evening was probably more like My Dinner with Andre. Or maybe it was reminiscent of Vanya on 42nd Street (just 10 blocks away!), another of Shawn's collaborations with Andre Gregory. In the end, it may turn out to have been the raw material for a new work from Shawn's own pen. Cheers, Mr. Shawn! Na zdorovie!

More animal sightings

If, as Pushkin said, translators are the posthorses of enlightenment, F. D. Reeve is the fleetest, sweetest of the breed you could ever hope to see kicking up his heels at the Samovar. Early on a recent Friday evening, there he was.

At 80+ years of age, Reeve has done and continues to do more than perhaps any single translator to bring 20th- and 21st-century Russian poetry and prose into English—in spite of being gifted enough simply to roam the earth in the guise of an animal much sleeker than a posthorse, namely, the Blue Cat, Reeve's poetic alter ego.

Far to the left are F.D. Reeve with his wife,the scholar and childrens' writer L.C. Stevenson. To the middle and right, the elusive muses of many, many Russian and/or Ukrainian cultural projects S.K. Harris and G.K. Warnecke (whose photos these are), and right of them all Reeve's fellow cat, Roman Kaplan, looking as if he just ate the canary. Was that on the menu?

You can find out more about F. D. Reeve from his very own website. Hear him read his poetry if you possibly can. F.D., when and where will that be?

Book Party for Michael Idov

Michael Idov is that rara avis who, having failed in the so-called «real» world, has been forced back into his day job as a novelist. Ground Up, loosely based on Idov's Lower East Side coffeehouse dream-turned-fiasco, has its release party at the Russian Samovar this Tuesday, August 4th, at 7pm. The lessons of failure must taste sweet to Idov, though, as his novel already basks in lots of praise, including that of a sort of literary uncle, Gary Shteyngart, who claims he «drank it right up» and found it «charming, manic and delicious.» Although I haven't yet read the book, I have my own personal theory about why Idov's coffeehouse failed, namely, that he idiotically called it «Café Trotsky,» giving the impression that it was a filthy hole where you would go to smoke a lot of cigarettes and talk revolution for hours over the single glass of tea you and your foul-smelling comrades could afford, when what Idov really hoped the masses would do was grab three or four cappucinos to go, every day. And then there are the depressing associations with Trotsky's untimely and gruesome demise at the hands of an NKVD (precursor to the KGB) agent in Mexico. Bad karma. But what do I know about what's in a name? I was convinced post-911 America would never elect a guy named Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency. Anyway, if you miss what will surely be a fun and elegant book party this Tuesday, Idov's doing a reading at the KGB bar in September.

Tonight at the Samovar!

Poet and prose writer Vadim Mesyats will read his poetry and, who knows, perhaps sing his folk and/or somewhat dirty songs (частушки), at 6pm this evening, Sunday, August 2. For a preview, check out this jazz-infused performance. Probably in Russian.