At Podvorye, a country restaurant favored by Vladimir Putin, peonies and zinnias
were blooming in profusion in the summer garden.
At Podvorye, a country restaurant favored by Vladimir Putin, peonies and zinnias
were blooming in profusion in the summer garden.
"Marina came in a red motorcar of an early 'runabout' type, operated by
the butler very warily as if it were some fancy variety of corkscrew.
She looked unwontedly smart in a man's grey flannels and sat holding
the palm of her gloved hand on the knob of a clouded cane as the car,
wobbling a little, arrived to the very edge of picnic site, a
picturesque glade in an old pinewood cut by ravishingly lovely ravines.
A strange pale butterfly passed from the opposite side of the woods,
along the Lugano dirt road, and was followed presently by a landau…."
--Vladimir Nabokov in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle , 1969
Nabokov's Ada is a novel that demands to be read during the dog days of summer, preferably on a velvet couch while drinking cold black tea spiced with black peppercorns and red currants. Ada and Van Veen's cousinly love affair evolves slowly and deliciously during a languid summer at their family's romantic country retreat. Even though Ardis, a three-story pile of "pale brick and purplish stone," is located in some mysterious land, not quite Russia, nor Europe or America, it is in spirit a summer place that evokes the dreamlike world of the old dachas built during the reign of Peter the Great.
Dacha means "something given"—and the term came to
be used for the property given by the tsar to his most loyal retainers.
Some dachas were simple log cottages or izbas, others were small palaces—but all of them were places of retreat
from the world, where long hot summers might be spent drowsing in
bedrooms on cool sheets, chasing butterflies in wildflower meadows, and
drinking, as Nabokov wrote, "the cold sweet tea of childhood".
Later, perusing the menu on Podvorye's website , I was struck by what we didn't have a chance to try: paprika (red peppers) pickled in honey, wild quail stuffed with lingonberries and apple, chicken Taback, pressed and grilled Caucasus style, sturgeon (Beluga) shashlik (on a skewer), and the "drunken desserts"—preserves of fruit like mulberries and cornelian cherries in liqueur, homemade at Guttsayt's own summer place in Crimea.
Podvorye Restaurant, 16 Filtrovskoye Avenue, Pavlovsk, St. Petersburg, Russia 196625. Telephone: 812-466-85-44. Web: www.podvorye.ru
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