A cafe in St Petersburg,a place founded on imperialist principles and transformed through revolutionary uprising.Credit:Shutterstock
There's no place for mushrooms in a dish of beef stroganoff,insists Anastasia Kosovskaya as we stride down St Petersburg's main drag,the Nevsky Prospect.
"Beef,cream,onion and mashed potato,"she says."No mushroom!"
But summer has arrived after a long,hard winter –"January was minus 37,May was minus 2,the snow only started to melt on May the 9th"– and the meadows and forests beyond the city limits are bubbling over with mushrooms.
Beef stroganoff - a dish said to have been invented in St Petersburg - in tomato gravy with sour cream served with mashed potatoes
"We have just 35 sunny days a year,"Kosovskaya says,peering up at the sky,"and today is beautiful!"
Summer's warmth has triggered those fungal spores and the city is overflowing with their bounty. You can buy them everywhere,in every formulation:dry mushrooms,fresh mushrooms,frozen mushrooms. Just don't add them to beef stroganoff.
My appetite is whet by all this talk of food,but I'm soon distracted by the stories of music and literature and revolution entombed in the buildings lining the Nevsky Prospect. This city is the receptacle of Russian history,a place founded on imperialist principles and transformed through revolutionary uprising;it has changed names often enough – St Petersburg,Petrograd,Leningrad,St Petersburg again – but has somehow retained its singular disposition.
"I think we have some sort of mentality for revolution,"Kosovskaya says of her city's residents.
This tussle between aristocracy and proletarianism is contained within the baroque and neoclassical apartment blocks that sweep down the boulevard towards the Neva River (where,on Zayachy Island,Dostoevsky was imprisoned and the Romanovs laid to rest). Once the homes of nobles,they were converted after the Bolshevik Revolution into communal lodgings.