High Society Dinners offers extraordinary insight into the domestic
arrangements of the Russian aristocracy, presenting nine months' worth
of menus served in St Petersburg to the guests of Petr Durnovo (1835 -
1918), Adjutant-General of the Tsar's Imperial Suite, part of an
important late-19th-century dynasty that included ministers and high
officials. The menus themselves would be useful enough for what they
reveal about culinary culture in Russia, but Yuri Lotman's commentary is
invaluable, dissecting the dining rituals and the social circles of the
participants. Durnovo's menus and guest lists, interspersed with
extracts from family letters and the leading newspapers and journals of
the day, set in context the domestic and gastronomic underpinnings of
life in this group at the heart of the Russian empire. Translated by
Marian Schwartz (who has worked with M. Gorbachev and translated works
by Tolstoy, Bulgakov and Lermontov), the book as a whole is annotated
and introduced by Darra Goldstein, Founding Editor of Gastronomica and
Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian at Williams
College. The book is illustrated with paintings and photographs that
give a sense of the high society milieu in mid-nineteenth-century
Russia.
