ABSTRACT
Russia has an extraordinarily rich culinary history. More than merely a means of sustenance, for centuries food has served as a contentious expression of national identity, social status, religious devotion, and political power. Russia’s ruling dynasties used food to assert their supremacy and authority over vast territories, to demonstrate their reach even beyond the borders of their own lands. The ‘legendary’ feasts hosted by the sixteenth-century tsar, Ivan the Terrible, with their myriads of extravagant courses sourced from every corner of the realm, served at tables laid for hundreds of guests, established a tradition of excess among Russia’s elites that would persist until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. This would not only generate tensions across society – between town and country, noble and peasant – but also come to threaten Russia’s sense of its own precious autonomous identity. In more modest terms, from the end of the eighteenth century, food began to take on a different aspect – as the subject and object of poetry and prose – becoming a pivotal motif expressive of the concerns of poets, playwrights, and novelists, imperial and Soviet. In its many incarnations, from real to surreal, from the beautiful to the grotesque, from object of pure art to weapon of social criticism, food has played a mutable yet permanent role in the Russian literary imagination.
