Co-sponsored by the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and the Steinhardt Food Studies Program, this session of the Feast and Famine Series will feature Darra Goldstein, Professor of Russian at Williams College and Founding Editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture.
Feast and Famine began in 1996, when the Food Studies program was launched. Marion Nestle (Food Studies-Steinhardt), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Performance Studies-Tisch) and Susan Rogers (Anthropology-GFAS) received a grant from the NYU Humanities Council to hold (6) interdisciplinary seminars each year. Food Studies has continually hosted Feast and Famine for the past 17 years between 4 and 6 times annually, adding up to over 100 presentations.
Invited scholars across disciplines circulate their work — usually in early stages of development — before the seminar meets, which ensures an open-ended and substantial discussion. There are over 100 Feast and Famine members, with 20-25 attending each session. A delicious light lunch is cooked and served by students as a part of their curriculum, encouraging a tactile and critical proximity to doing and thinking.
In the upcoming session, Goldstein will present her paper "Yuri Lotman Does High Society: Dining with Aristocrats in Nineteenth-Century Russia."
Near the end of his life, Yuri Lotman, a seminal figure in structuralism and cultural semiotics, became interested in Russian culinary culture. He had acquired nearly a year’s worth of menus for dinners served in 1857-1858 at the table of the Saint Petersburg aristocrat Petr Pavlovich Durnovo, Adjutant-General of the Tsar’s Imperial Suite. The menus, and their accompanying guest lists, offered Lotman a new way to illuminate Russian culture, both national and culinary, by creating what he called “a domestic History of unhistoric events.”
The resulting volume, High Society Dinners, is the subject of this talk, which will discuss the dining practices of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy. By interspersing Durnovo’s menus with extracts from family letters and the leading newspapers and journals of the day, Lotman contextualized the domestic and gastronomic underpinnings of life in this group close to the center of power in the Russian empire.
