Interview with Tatiana N.

Interview with Tatiana N.

Interview on Russian solyanka

At the time of our interview Tatiana was 53 years old and working as a professor. She was born in Tambov, but spent her childhood in Lviv and Nizhny Novgorod. At thirty she moved to Moscow. She teaches as a visiting professor at Colorado College and this is where we met.

Sam M. Jamieson (Interviewer and Transcriber)

Interview recorded on the 9th of March in 2020.

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English

Interview Transcription

Summary: We discussed Tatiana’s associations with solyanka. She associates it with the 19th century and sees it as a food of the middle class. We also discussed the name of the dish and how it fits into the idiomatic expression.

S.M.J.: When you think solyanka, what time period do you associate it with?

T.N.: Just the word itself, solyanka?

S.M.J.: The soup, both. The word and the soup.

T.N.: I would say it is 19th century, because for me it is associated with Russian literature, with Gogol I would say, because I am not sure where in his writings, but I think that this is when I first heard, or found this word, and not солянка, селянка, like a village soup or a village dish. If you please.

…

S.M.J.: Would you say it is Russian?

T.N.: Yes, I would say it is Russian.

S.M.J.: So you would say it’s more likely to be Russian, than say, Ukrainian?

T.N.: It’s a good question, you know, the fact is, if we are talking about the 19th century, it was just like, one country, it was Велика Россия and Малая Россия, but people who lived there, of course, they knew about Ukraine and they would say that “He lives in Ukraine”, but in fact it was seen as one space and one area. So, like for me it would be Russian, but it could also be Ukranian.

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S.M.J.: Like what class would you say eats solyanka?

T.N.: Like I would say, of course if you don’t have money though, you wouldn’t eat solyanka. But if you-

S.M.J.: So you wouldn’t say it is a soup of leftovers?

T.N.: No, I wouldn’t call- No, it can be, actually yes, it can be, but also you have to have these leftovers.

S.M.J.: But your first association is it is a more middle class-

T.N.: Yes, I would say it is more middle class. Even leftovers should be the middle class leftovers.

S.M.J.: Okay

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S.M.J.: Okay, so сборная солянка, like as a phrase, linguistically how often have you seen solyanka incorporated into phrases? Like “it is all solyanka”?

T.N.: Like it is the typical slang you would find in any menu of any cantine restaurant, which serves solyanka, солянка сборная, yeah, and interestingly, exactly this order. So normally, in our speech we would say сборная солянка, so adjective comes first, but in this case it is солянка сборная, more this formal way to present the dish.

S.M.J.: Why do you think that is?

T.N.: What?

S.M.J.: Like why do you think that is?

T.N.: The first, because, because, you can find it more often in again, not. Like it is a specific, like it must be a specific kind of solyanka and if they say солянка сборная it must mean there must be some other kind of solyanka, which is not сборная, and I haven’t heard of any. For me solyanka is this солянка сборная, like which consists of several different products.

S.M.J.: And so then, have you heard the phrase “it’s all solyanka”, like solyanka used as like, an idiomatic expression. Like I had one Siberian interviewee who said oh, calling something a mixture of something is solyanka.

T.N.: That’s right. Yes, but also because it is сборная, like you use all kinds of products to cook solyanka. Actually yes, people, yes, I heard but I don’t use it, but I heard other people use it.

S.M.J.: Okay.

T.N.: Actually even like interestingly, I was writing an article with five other people, like this collective effort and there was one person, she put all the parts together and this is what she called the file, it was called solyanka, yeah, meaning, meaning that we all paid our effort into it.

Audio Recording