borsch
▪ food
also spelled Borscht, Borsht, or Bortsch,
beet soup of the Slavic countries. Although borsch is important in Russian and Polish cuisines, the Ukraine is frequently cited as its place of origin. Borsches are eaten hot or cold; some are clear and light, others thick and substantial.
Ukrainian borsch is a hearty soup of beef and a variety of vegetables in which root vegetables and cabbage predominate, and the soup takes its characteristic colour from beets. The soup is often eaten with a sour cream garnish and with pirozhki, turnovers filled with beef and onions. A meatless beet soup is made with a stock flavoured with forest mushrooms; this Polish barszcz is served with tiny mushroom-filled dumplings, uszka. Some Russian borsches are made with kvass, a mild beer fermented from grain or bread.
vodka
▪ distilled liquor
distilled liquor, clear in colour and without definite aroma or taste, ranging in alcoholic content from about 40 to 55 percent. Because it is highly neutral, with flavouring substances mainly eliminated during processing, it can be made from a mash of the cheapest and most readily available raw materials suitable for fermentation. Potatoes were traditionally employed in Russia and Poland but have largely been supplanted there and in other vodka-producing countries by cereal grains.
Vodka originated in Russia during the 14th century, and the name is a diminutive of the Russian voda (“water”). The beverage was mainly popular in Russia, Poland, and the Balkan states until soon after World War II, when consumption began to increase rapidly in the United States and then in Europe. Most producers purchase previously distilled and purified neutral spirits that are extremely high in alcohol content, with almost no flavouring substances remaining. Such spirits are then additionally purified by a filtration process, usually employing charcoal, and are then reduced in strength with distilled water and bottled without aging.
In Russia, where fairly low alcohol content of 40 percent by volume (80 U.S. proof) is preferred, and in Poland, where 45 percent is more common, vodka is usually consumed unmixed and chilled, in small glasses, and accompanied by appetizers. In other countries it is popular for use in mixed drinks because of its neutral character. It may be combined with other beverages without imparting flavour of its own and substituted for other spirits in cocktails not requiring the specific flavour of the original spirit. Popular vodka drinks include the screwdriver, made with orange juice; the bloody Mary, with tomato juice; vodka and tonic, a tall drink; and the vodka martini, with vodka substituted for gin.
Vodkas are sometimes flavoured. Zubrówka, yellowish in colour, highly aromatic, and with a somewhat bitter undertone, is produced by steeping several stalks of Zubrówka, or buffalo grass, in vodka. Other flavoured vodkas are made with such ingredients as lemon peel, berries, peppercorns, and caraway.
Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreyevich
▪ Russian poet
born Jan. 29 [Feb. 9, New Style], 1783, Tula province, Russia
died April 12 [April 24], 1852, Baden-Baden, Baden [Germany]
Russian poet and translator, one of Aleksandr Pushkin's most important precursors in forming Russian verse style and language.
Zhukovsky, the illegitimate son of a landowner and a Turkish slave girl, was educated in Moscow. He served in the Napoleonic War of 1812 and in 1815 joined the tsar's entourage, becoming tutor to the heir to the throne in 1826. In 1841 he retired to Germany.
Zhukovsky was a follower of Nikolay Karamzin (Karamzin, Nikolay Mikhaylovich), the head of a Romantic literary movement that countered the classical emphasis on reason with the belief that poetry should be an expression of feeling. Zhukovsky was a founder of the Arzamas society, a semihumorous, pro-Karamzin literary group established to oppose the classicists. Like Pushkin, Zhukovsky was interested especially in personal experience, Romantic conceptions of landscape, and folk ballads. His first publication was a translation of Thomas Gray's An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (1802), and the bulk of his work consists of free translations. He introduced into Russia the works of such German and English contemporaries as Gottfried Bürger, Friedrich von Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and Robert Southey, as well as such classic works as Homer's Odyssey (1849).
His collected works were published in four volumes in 1959–60.
Arzamas society
▪ Russian literary society
Russian literary circle that flourished in 1815–18 and was formed for the semiserious purpose of ridiculing the conservative “Lovers of the Russian Word,” a group dominated by the philologist Aleksandr S. Shishkov (Shishkov, Aleksandr Semyonovich), who wished to keep the modern Russian language firmly tied to Old Church Slavonic. The Arzamas circle included the poets Vasily A. Zhukovsky (Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreyevich), Konstantin Batyushkov (Batyushkov, Konstantin Nikolayevich), and the youthful Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich), who were all advocates of recent Westernized language reforms. Though the activities of the club members were limited to composing burlesques of the archaic Slavonic style, their adoption of the new style in their subsequent works had a permanent effect on the formation of the modern Russian literary language.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich
▪ Russian author
Introduction
born May 26 [June 6, New Style], 1799, Moscow, Russia
died Jan. 29 [Feb. 10], 1837, St. Petersburg
Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer; he has often been considered his country's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.
The early years.
Pushkin's father came of an old boyar family; his mother was a granddaughter of Abram Hannibal, who, according to family tradition, was an Abyssinian princeling bought as a slave at Constantinople (Istanbul) and adopted by Peter the Great, whose comrade in arms he became. Pushkin immortalized him in an unfinished historical novel, Arap Petra Velikogo (1827; The Negro of Peter the Great). Like many aristocratic families in early 19th-century Russia, Pushkin's parents adopted French culture, and he and his brother and sister learned to talk and to read in French. They were left much to the care of their maternal grandmother, who told Aleksandr, especially, stories of his ancestors in Russian. From Arina Rodionovna Yakovleva, his old nurse, a freed serf (immortalized as Tatyana's nurse in Yevgeny Onegin), he heard Russian folktales. During summers at his grandmother's estate near Moscow he talked to the peasants and spent hours alone, living in the dream world of a precocious, imaginative child. He read widely in his father's library and gained stimulus from the literary guests who came to the house.
In 1811 Pushkin entered the newly founded Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo (later renamed Pushkin) and while there began his literary career with the publication (1814, in Vestnik Evropy, “The Messenger of Europe”) of his verse epistle “To My Friend, the Poet.” In his early verse, he followed the style of his older contemporaries, the Romantic poets K.N. Batyushkov and V.A. Zhukovsky (Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreyevich), and of the French 17th- and 18th-century poets, especially the Vicomte de Parny.
While at the Lyceum he also began his first completed major work, the romantic poem Ruslan i Lyudmila (1820; Ruslan and Ludmila), written in the style of the narrative poems of Ludovico Ariosto and Voltaire but with an old Russian setting and making use of Russian folklore. Ruslan, modeled on the traditional Russian epic hero, encounters various adventures before rescuing his bride, Ludmila, daughter of Vladimir, grand prince of Kiev, who, on her wedding night, has been kidnapped by the evil magician Chernomor. The poem flouted accepted rules and genres and was violently attacked by both of the established literary schools of the day, Classicism and Sentimentalism. It brought Pushkin fame, however, and Zhukovsky presented his portrait to the poet with the inscription “To the victorious pupil from the defeated master.”