I was amused to hear his sister describe some of those eruptions in her slow, Quakerly fashion.

On the breakfast table I can see the remains of: sturgeon, caviare (pink and black), blinies, cottage cheese and two other cheeses, buckwheat, hatchapuri—a bread cheese—and sour cream, hashi (stew), radishes and spring onions […]

Many brought presents of roast chickens and pigs, swinging the fowls by their legs as they extolled their succulence.

There is the small effortless chupse of indifference; the thin hard chupse of mere disdain; the long, liquid, vibrating chupse which shakes the rafters and expresses every kind of defiance."