The Books: Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink; edited by David Remnick; ‘The Russian God’, by Victor Erofeyev

Next up on the essays shelf:

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick

Secret Ingredients is a collection of food writing from The New Yorker. I love these collections. So far, we have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories, The Fun of It, and The New Gilded Age.

I’m not a foodie, but I love this collection because 1. it gives snapshots of different eras, 2. the writing is great.

Written in 2002, in Russian, the piece was translated for The New Yorker by Andrew Bromfield. It’s the story of Russia’s self-destructive love affair with vodka. It is about the various periods in its history when powers-that-be tried to crack down (to devastating results, because people were such serious alcoholics). As happened during the Prohibition era in the United States, once liquor was not readily available people started boiling, oh, motor oil, and dying and all that. Russia has those periods as well. Vodka has a long history in Russia, of course, and Erofeyev gets into that as well. Vodka is its most recent name. For most of its history it was referred to as “grain wine” or other names like that. Vodka is entrenched in the Russian psychology. Erofeyev talks about why. I remember talking to someone once, and I said, just in passing, that it bugged me that the Irish had such reputations for drunkenness, when the reality in Ireland is often much mellower. People having quiet stouts in pubs and talking. Of course there are alcoholics there, but the drinking scene in Ireland is, yes, omnipresent, but also pretty mellow. I was talking to a Russian, and he said, “Ireland can’t hold a candle to the problem we have in Russia.” He made it sound like a national emergency. And so does Erofeyev.

(Erofeyev, by the way, has a very interesting history. His father was an interpreter for Molotov in the 1940s. Wow! Erofeyev has run afoul of Russian censorship, a tiresome addition to the same old tale. He’s a wonderful writer.)

The “drunk” given by vodka is different than the “drunk” given by 15 stouts. Travelers to Russia, throughout its history, would come home and tell stories about the debauchery they witnessed. Vodka production is tied up in the criminal class now, too, so it’s all a big mess. It’s hard to un-tangle it, to try to get a handle on it.

People are gonna drink. That’s the fact. Erofeyev knows that. He seems disturbed by the place vodka holds in Russian society (I mean, look at the title). He offers no solutions.

It’s a good piece. Cynical about his country and his countrymen. A lot of the information here I did not know. I am sure there have been books written about vodka and the Russians. It’s a rich topic.

Here’s an excerpt.

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick; ‘The Russian God’, by Victor Erofeyev

The secret of the word “vodka” lies in its effect on the masses – in the mixture of lust and shame it inspires. The alcoholic views vodka as a woman; he is afraid to reveal his feelings for her, and is at the same time incapable of restraining them. The very mention of her name creates an atmosphere of conspiracy and mystical exaltation that provokes a kind of pagan stupor. In its essence, vodka is a brazen and shameless thing.

Vodka is unlike other forms of alcohol in that there is no justifiable excuse for drinking it. The Frenchman will praise the aroma of cognac, and the Scotsman will laud the flavor of whiskey. Vodka, however, is colorless, odorless, and tasteless. At the same time, it is an acrid and irritating drink. The Russian gulps his vodka down, grimacing and swearing, and immediately reaches for something else to “smooth it out”. The result, not the process, is what’s important. You might as well inject vodka into your bloodstream as drink it.

But then that’s not entirely true, as all Russians, with the exception of the estimated 5 percent of the adult population that doesn’t drink, can tell you. Vodka is like a song – it may have banal lyrics and a simple melody, but the combination, like that of alcohol and water, is more than the sum of its parts. In respectable society these days, vodka is served at a table set with a range of dishes perfected in minute detail by the old Russian landowners. The vodka ceremony has its own traditions (“No eating after the first glass”), its superstitions and catchphrases (“Vodka is the aunt of wine”), its schedule (ordinary Russian drunks are distinguished from alcoholics by the fact that they wait until five in the afternoon to start drinking), and its accoutrements (fish, salted gherkins, pickled mushrooms, jellied mat, and sauerkraut) – not to mention its toasts, which are the perfect excuse for consuming alcohol while simultaneously focusing on the general conversation. Every Russian knows that drinking vodka with pelmeni, a kind of mean dumpling, can induce a high not far short of nirvana.

Vodka has taken control of the will and conscience of a substantial sector of the Russian population. If you add up all the time that Russians have devoted to vodka and gather together all the vodka-fueled impulses of the soul – the fantasies, the dreams, the weeklong binges, the family catastrophes, the shamefaced hangovers, the murders, suicides, and fatalities (favorite Russian pastimes include choking on your own vomit and falling out of a window) – it becomes clear that behind the official history of the Russian state there exists another dimension. Despite all the misadventures and tragedies of Russian alcoholism, the spotlight here belongs to the inexplicable, almost universal delight that Russians take in the notion of drunken disorder. That delight has been recorded over the centuries in the accounts of astounded foreign travelers, such as the Dutch diplomat Balthazar Coet, who visited Moscow in 1676, and wrote, “We saw only the scandalous behavior of debauchees, glorified by the thronging crowd for their proficiency in drunkenness.” We encounter the same philosophy in the samizdat bestseller from the Brezhnev era, Venedikt Erofeyev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, a manifesto of indiscriminate social dissidence and a frank apologia for the metaphysics of drunkenness. “Everybody in Russia who was ever worth anything,” the book asserts, “every one of them drank like swine.”

Drinking vodka is a social activity. When John Steinbeck was in Moscow, the story has it, it took him a while to understand that the three fingers two friendly guys waved at him were an invitation to split a bottle of vodka three ways; he ended up drinking a trois with them in a doorway anyway, apparently with no regrets. But the vodka-drinking ritual also involves a harsh questioning of human convention. It demands freedom from history, from responsibility, from health, even from life itself. This condition of free fall, of moral weightlessness and philosophical incorporeality, represents both an attack on the “rational” West and a haughty assertion of Russian truth.

Gorbachev is of the opinion that “vodka has done more harm than good to the Russian people,” but Evgeny Popov, a contemporary Russian writer who comes from hard-drinking Siberia, holds the opposite view. In conversation in the bar of Moscow’s Central Writers’ House, Popov claimed that vodka has helped the Russian people counter the stress of living in a less than perfect nation. Vodka has provided access to a private life that is closed to the state, a place where it is possible to relax, to forget your troubles, to engage in sex with the illusion of free choice. Nowhere else has the relationship between literature and drink been as intense as it is in Russia. The revolutionary Nikolai Nekrasov, the emigre Aleksandr Kuprin, the leading Stalinist writer Aleksandr Fadayev, the Nobel prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov, and the man who is probably the best Russian writer of the twentieth century, Andrei Platonov, have all had love affairs with the bottle. As Popov told me, “Vodka makes it easier to think up literary plots.”

The philosophy of vodka has its dark corner of violence. Russian despots with a sadistic streak, like Peter the Great and Stalin, have taken pleasure in forcing their guests to drink more than they could handle. Other hosts force-feed their guests vodka in order to reduce the social distance between them, to humiliate and deride or take advantage. Vodka is capable not only of generating bravado but also of inducing the excruciating feeling of remorse and self-abasement that is one of the essential elements of the ambivalent Russian personality. Hence the question that the Russian alcoholic traditionally asks his drinking companion: “Do you respect me?” The drinking Russian suffers from a marked divergence between his sober impulses and his drunken ones. It is not easy to govern an entire people in this state.