The exhibition “Fatherland to Us “Russian Samovar”” opened at the Brodsky Museum “One and a Half Rooms” in St. Petersburg

The exhibition “Fatherland to Us “Russian Samovar”” has opened at the Joseph Brodsky Museum “One and a Half Rooms” in St. Petersburg. This is the first public display in Russia of the archive of Roman Kaplan, the owner of the legendary Russian restaurant in New York. Considered Kira Dolinina.

The appearance of the Roman Kaplan archive exhibition in the One and a Half Room museum poster is completely justified. And the point is not even that Joseph Brodsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov for some time (since 1987) were co-owners of the Russian Samovar restaurant, but that Brodsky was a regular at the establishment and, to a large extent, one of its main “lures.” Guests came to Brodsky, sometimes absolutely wonderful, sometimes so-so, people who liked to gawk. But the poet himself loved this place, he loved to eat there, and even more – to drink, he loved to listen to the famous pianist Alexander Izbitser who played there, and sometimes he himself sang along or sang solo to his accompaniment. Drawings and dedications left by Brodsky in the restaurant’s guest book, a video from the owner’s anniversary in 1994, in which Brodsky sings “Black Eyes” and sings along with Yuzu Aleshkovsky in his great song “Comrade Stalin, you are a great scientist” and numerous photographs of the Nobel laureate in the interiors of the “Russian Samovar” are quite well known. But now “A Room and a Half” is adding a lot of new material from the Kaplan archive purchased by Alexander Mamut in 2018. The image of the legendary restaurant becomes much clearer.

The history of the “Russian Samovar” is both similar and different from the stories of other Russian emigrant establishments. Precisely emigrants, because the comparison with the St. Petersburg “Stray Dog”, often flatteringly applied to “Samovar”, is completely false. If we compare, then with the restaurants and cabarets of Russian Berlin and Paris in the 1920s, with the establishments of emigrants from the USSR in Israel that opened and quickly closed in the 1970s–1990s, with dozens of other Russian restaurants in the USA. In almost all of the above types of establishments, the emigrant flair was transmitted through nostalgia – nostalgia, first of all, for food, but also for “one’s own” company, understandable cultural, behavioral and gastronomic codes, and the language of communication. The difference is in the details. So, for example, in the second most famous Russian restaurant in New York – “Odessa” – in Brighton Beach, which still speaks more Russian than English, they served the same dumplings, herring under a fur coat and ice-cold vodka as Kaplan’s, but Willy Tokarev sang there and the number of gold chains on the thick necks of the regulars was off the charts.

The darling of the party, the brilliant Kaplan, who played farts in his Leningrad youth, must be admitted, also loved criminal chanson, and even more – gypsy music, but his pianist played Beethoven or Haydn, and Aleshkovsky was responsible for the criminal songs, many of them he himself composed. And the location for the restaurant required a completely different crowd and show-off: “Russian Samovar” opened in 1986 on 52nd Street in Manhattan, in exactly the same building where Frank Sinatra bought premises for his best friend in the 1960s Jilly Rizzo to open Jilly’s restaurant there. Sinatra was very loved by the mafiosi. It’s hard to say whether the “Russian” New York gangsters loved Kaplan, but the audience at his “Samovar” was mixed, which is what he became famous for. Yes, yes, caviar with vodka, pancakes, dumplings, khachapuri, original liqueurs, jellied meat (with which Baryshnikov’s hero will treat Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and the City in the 2000s in the interiors of the Russian Samovar) – this, of course, very important. But the opportunity to see Susan Sontag or Philip Roth, Yevtushenko or Dovlatov, Baryshnikov or Liza Minnelli at the neighboring tables in the company of people with the dubious appearance of clever swindlers gave the establishment a special flair. To some extent, there is a certain emigrant doom in this – in a foreign land it is much more difficult to choose your environment than in your homeland, there are strange rapprochements.

Of course, it was such an exquisite shalman. But the archival image of the “Russian Samovar” preserved the main content of the restaurant for its creator: it was a meeting place for the Moscow-Leningrad bohemia who emigrated mainly in the 1970s and the ITE members who joined them with those who were able to go abroad with the opening of borders after perestroika. There was not a single theatrical or concert tour from the USSR (and then the Russian Federation) to New York, after which the visiting stars did not end up in the “Russian Samovar”. Artists, writers, musicians, actors – hundreds of names are noted in Roman Kaplan’s guest book. Based on it, you can write a dissertation about the meeting of two artistic worlds, those who emigrated and those who remained in the Union. One meeting between Brodsky and Yevtushenko, when the former did not answer the guest’s outstretched hand, is worth it. As well as the proximity in the archive of recordings from Nikita Mikhalkov and those whom today it is difficult to imagine in the same company with him – Alexander Genis, Evgeny Kissin, Vagrich Bakhchanyan and many others.

But in the albums everything is peaceful and colorful: cartoons, drawings, couplets, poetic and prose jokes, the biggest names of Russian culture abroad and guests from behind the fallen Iron Curtain. “What was “Metropol”, no, “Astoria”, no, “Yar”, // Where we didn’t finish walking, didn’t finish drinking, – in general, THERE, // Turned out to be a Russian samovar, “Russian Samovar”, // For he cooks stew from us, cooks, cooks himself” (Anatoly Naiman). Today we know that this stew was given a short term. “Russian Samovar” itself, which barely survived the death of Brodsky, slightly rebelled in the wake of the glory of “Sex and the City,” was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2018. Roman Kaplan dies in 2021. The restaurant remains under the management of family members, but there are few of those emigration and those bandits left. The aesthetics of leather sofas, golden velvet, ice sculpture and the strange Russian-Jewish party that enlivened this funny interior are gone forever. The cold, classical design of the exhibition, seemingly not composed by the same Alexander Brodsky, who several years ago created the museum as an extraordinary air bubble of the poet’s memory, is, if appropriate, precisely in this statement of death. The museum, of course, is trying to fit into the time it has. But it is quite dangerous to explore the most striking phenomenon of the culture of Soviet emigration in the museum of a poet expelled by officials who hated the authorities who judged thoughts. Although the museum and its director Marina Loshak, apparently, are not afraid of this – and, on the contrary, will expand. They promise to open a “restaurant” or “snack bar.” Here “Russian samovar” suits their theme.