Seasoned Socialism

Anastasia Lakhtikova received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Angela Brintlinger is Professor of Slavic Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University and author of Writing a Usable Past: Russian Literary Culture (1917–1937) and Chapaev and His Comrades: War and the Russian Literary Hero across the Twentieth Century. Irina Glushchenko teaches in the School of Cultural Studies of the Division of Humanities at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. She is author of Food and Drinks: Mikoyan and Soviet Cuisine and editor of Time, Forward! Cultural Politics in the USSR and (with Boris Kagarlitsky and Vitaly Kurennoy) of USSR: Life after Death.

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