On the breakfast table I can see the remains of: sturgeon, caviare (pink and black), blinies, cottage cheese and two other cheeses, buckwheat, hatchapuri—a bread cheese—and sour cream, hashi (stew), radishes and spring onions […]

I was amused to hear his sister describe some of those eruptions in her slow, Quakerly fashion.

There is the small effortless chupse of indifference; the thin hard chupse of mere disdain; the long, liquid, vibrating chupse which shakes the rafters and expresses every kind of defiance."

Many brought presents of roast chickens and pigs, swinging the fowls by their legs as they extolled their succulence.