Gastronomic accounts of the Ancient Rome in the poem Dinner by V. S. Filimonov (1837)

The article considers Dinner by V. S. Filimonov (1837) as a literary and gastronomic poem. The dishes mentioned by the poet are not only of practical use, they are incorporated into the system of literary relationships, and become a source of intertextual connections and allusions. V. S. Filimonov’s characters taste not only and not so much the dishes and drinks served; they rather taste life itself: over dinner they satisfy their hunger of long-expected meetings with true friends, have polemic conversations, relish literary novelties. The research focuses on the food culture of Ancient Rome. The poem Dinner follows the forming system of images of the Russian Italiana of the 1840s, but its thematic peculiarity allows S. V. Filimonov to show the power, the eternity of Rome from another point of view – the everyday one. Five categories, recreating the picture of the gastronomic life of the great empire, have been singled out: popular phrases and Latin expressions; culinary dishes; names and events; elements of everyday life and customs; quotes from the works of Roman authors. The object of research in this article is the first category: popular phrases and Latin expressions. A transformation of the expressions “edimus ut vivamus”, “non vivimus ut edamus”, “sub rosā”, “in vino veritas” can be traced. A probable source of the Latin expression “nubes exculenta“ for V. S. Filimonov is assumed to be the treatise of a French political leader J. A. Brillat-Savarin. By studying the culinary encyclopedia, dictionaries and cookbooks of the 18–21st centuries, an attempt is made to identify the dishes included in the notion of “nubes exculenta“ (edible clouds). The poem Dinner is compared to the original texts of the Roman authors – Natural History by Pliny the Elder, On Nature, On the Blessed Life by Seneca. The Latin sources have been translated by the author of the article.

V. S. Filimonov, Dinner, Ancient Rome, sub rosā