"Russian Cuisine in Exile" - a collection of essays and essays on gastronomic topics written by Peter Weil and Alexander Genis in New York in the mid-1980s - is by no means a cookbook, although almost each of its chapters is crowned with a simple but elegant and colorful culinary recipe. Before us is a real, time-tested literary monument of history and culture that has gathered a huge army of admirers. A monument to a whole civilization, first established on distant shores thanks to the efforts of the "third wave" of Russian emigration, and then surprisingly organically merged into the world and system that was born in the new Russia. Weil and Genis again and again amaze the reader with the accuracy of observations and brilliant erudition. Their essays are devoted, as it becomes clearer as they read, not so much to Russian cuisine as to Russian people themselves (in the broadest, "geopolitical" sense of the word), Russian life and Russian times. And the fact that each of these witty essays also offers us a purely gastronomic discovery is an additional gift prepared by generous authors.