SOURCE: Glants, Musya and Joyce Toomre. Introduction to Food in Russian History and Culture, pp. xi-xxvii. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Glants and Toomre provide an overview of the use of food customs as a metaphor for Russian national culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The chronicle of everyday life brings the past closer to us with a social sharpness and vividness. In order to understand Leo Tolstoy or Chekhov more clearly, for instance, we need to know the daily life of their epoch. Even the poetry of Pushkin achieves its full luster only for those who know the everyday life of his era.

—Konstantin Paustovskii¹

Scholars today widely echo these sentiments as they concentrate on simple moments in ordinary life to help illuminate the present while enriching our understanding of the past. In this new view of history, ordinary people sleep, take showers...