THE TASTE OF DREAMS

Moody Russian days from London Times correspondent Bennett.

The journalist had flirted with Soviet Russia for some years before 1991, when she wangled a job as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and the Los Angeles Times. Here, she doesn’t concentrate on the breaking stories of the time, but on the less covered subjects of daily life, personal bemusements, and food. For the Russian on the street, as Bennett sees it, food is love, and caviar is its purest expression: “Does caviar actually taste good? That question is pointless. Your spoonful of black eggs is full of far more than salt and oil and protein. It is weighed down with symbolism.” Yes, Bennett likes the taste, but she likes caviar’s symbolism even more: it’s the food of regret and nostalgia, of conquest (“a delicacy snatched from the mouths of the defeated khans”), of dashing, freebooting Cossack caviar traders. Thoughts on this quintessentially Russian delicacy wend their way through the story, but don’t overwhelm it. Bennett is interested in topics as diverse as azart, the give-a-damn strain running through many Russians in the early 1990s that means “not being satisfied that you’ve got enough till you’ve got far too much.” She’s fascinated by the old southern lands—“Dagestan, a poor, crime-ridden and mostly Muslim place next door to poor, crime-ridden, mostly Muslim Chechnya”—and more taken with the fantastical coups and crazy semi-wars of the region than the big bloodbath in Chechnya (though she published a book about it, Crying Wolf, in the UK). The more obscure conflicts tell us more about life in the area, Bennett believes. She also notes, as press reports rarely do, that after all the insanity, “gradually people went back to living their real lives. . . . Most people were sick of excess.” Azart was replaced with “a taste for dull bourgeois luxuries,” and “everyone I knew had a respectable job to go to in the mornings.”

A realistic and lingering picture of evolving Russia.