The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

To feed and care for everyone, providing them all with an Easter egg, a pickled apple, a Christmas goose, or a nameday pie, required unending labor, care, and constant attention. And truly, the care devoted to the airiness and wafting smells of these pies, a care which some might find ridiculous, indicated a caring for people, something that was not ridiculous at all but worthy of great praise. And the care with which all those pies were baked, and all those Antonov apples pickled with cardamon, was taken seriously by my mother and father, and taught to us.

All summer our house would be humming with activity—my mother’s activity, of course—according to the old proverb: “Make hay while the sun shines.”

Not a single apple that fell in our garden was wasted. Round apple slices were strung on twine in bountiful garlands (we loved this task) and hung under the beams of our spacious attic. Our braziers glowed unendingly with golden coals in the garden on the path near the house; basin after basin of preserves were being simmered. Sour cherries were marinated in vinegar in a special way.

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Chapter Two

Closer to autumn the “pickling” season began: plums, grapes, and then apples. Crates of Antonov apples were purchased at the Boloto Market. The smell of apples—wonderful, cheerful as a September morning, clear as crystal— would reign for several days throughout the house. Amber-golden hay was laid down in the dining room, where the apples were sorted, the hearty ones separated from the weaker, paler apples. The cellar would become inhabited by tubs of apples. After that came the turn of the lingonberries, my father’s favorite. We stocked them in tubs as well. We pickled whole vats of cucumbers, and they were unusually tasty and wonderfully strong.

We would pickle, marinate, and dry mushrooms. This was an art in itself and presented its own difficulties. After the cucumbers came the cabbage. The chopping of the cabbage passed quickly and merrily. Everyone took part. Everyone crunched on cabbage cores. But my mother had the most important task: she had to calculate how much cabbage to chop, how much to slice up, and how much to leave unchopped. It was important to choose the most auspicious time for the cabbage: when it was cheap and in season, just begging to be pickled.

The cabbage cares of autumn would come to an end, and then we had to salt the corned beef for the coming year, stock the year’s salted fish, and also think of marinating the sturgeon and cod for appetizers for our guests. The supply of wine was renewed with only the guests in mind; hence, the amount wasn’t large, but still highly varied. I remember the difficult process of preparing the plum brandy, which would take my mother several days. I remember the flavoring of all sorts of vodkas in rounded bottles and broad-shouldered decanters. All of this was selfless and even unpleasant work for my mother: neither she nor my father would taste even a drop of all these riches, since they couldn’t stand alcohol. The only commonly consumed drink in our house was kvas, wonderful kvas made from bread that every member of the household would drink in all amounts at all times. [A kind of beer made by fermenting rye bread or rye flour, yeast, malt, and sugar; served chilled.]

Much more pleasing for my mother and for us children was the work involved in preparing other foods: all sorts of fruit spreads from figs, black currants, apples, cherries, and plums—all these were favorite victuals of ours.

All of this prodigious labor was in preparation for the winter. But there was also the labor of winter itself, and for the family, and for the house of thirty people and its large number of guests, and for those being helped on the side. And all this demanded unending work from my mother.

Sergei N. Durylin, Domestic Love

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NOTES

A quotation from Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin’s 1831 novel-in-verse (Chapter Eight, third stanza, lines 1–2). Translation by Walter Arndt, in Pushkin Threefold: Narrative, Lyric, Polemic, and Ribald Verse (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1972), p. 160.

From Lermontov’s narrative poem “The Demon,” Part XVI. Translation by Anatoly Liberman in Mikhail Lermontov: Major Poetical Works (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 411.

Chapter Three

Sofiia Kovalevskaia, A Thief in the House