The Capital Restaurant as a Phenomenon of fin-de-siecle Russian Life (From Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy to Kuprin and Bunin)

This article analyzes the restaurant as a cultural phenomenon in Russian life. By using numerous literary sources, the author is able to trace the dynamics of everyday ideology associated with the restaurant as a cultural and social institution. The restaurant's functions as a background for literary storytelling, its place in the development of literary plots, commentary concerning restaurants, the restaurant as a subject of fiction - all this provides important information about how society perceived the restaurant during a particular period. The fin de siecle was characterized by a restaurant boom, which was associated with the rapid development and democratization of Russian society. The preceding period of the mid-nineteenth century and the subsequent Soviet period repressed the very idea of the restaurant, and in many ways their respective attitudes toward restaurant culture coincided.