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# The Much-Discussed “Kofemania” and Its Clientele Are Not Merely a Portrait of Our Times
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/tak-mnogo-obsuzhdaemaia-kofemaniia-i-ee-publika-eto-ne-tolko-kartina-nashego-vremeni/
- Published: 2019-04-18T13:13:59.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T09:29:22.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Books, Moscow, Observations, Mores, Saint Petersburg

The much-discussed “Kofemania” and its clientele are not merely a portrait of our times. Whenever I visit one of my favourite branches, the one on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, I find myself, for some reason, transported into the atmosphere of the celebrated nineteenth-century Petersburg coffee house of “Wolff and Béranger”, the first café in Russia whose character most closely resembles the present-day look of “Kofemania”.

Naturally, I cannot help observing with rapture the motley public, which changes with the time of day yet is in no way inferior to the Onegin-era specimens: ladies with young cavaliers, solid gentlemen with young misses, romantic couples, business suits, sad solitary schoolboys and students, fashionable gentlemen, stylish womenfolk. Nor can I help pressing myself greedily to the window of desserts. My favourite is the French pie. Coffee, I confess, is not my favourite; rather, it is my least favourite drink, somewhere on a par with vinegar and the mysterious liquid that Dumbledore drank in the cave with the false Horcrux.

Incidentally, in my dislike of coffee I am quite traditional. In Russia of olden times coffee was not the most fashionable and adored of drinks. The first coffee house, the Dutch one, appeared in the capital at the very beginning of the eighteenth century; it was an establishment for foreigners, because the Russian felt no such wild delight at the sight of coffee foam, although for more than ten years, from 1720, Petersburgers could visit the “Four Frigates” on Trinity Square, where “kofiy”, as it was then called, was served. But the mad love of our own little age never took shape.

Yet the coffee people insist that coffee houses in Russia at once became extremely popular. I do not believe them. Do you know why? Because I have never come across, for instance, the heroes of a popular play drinking coffee, or an important conversation in a tense scene of a novel taking place over “kofiy”. If all that exists, it comes much later. In Fonvizin they do not drink coffee, in Radishchev they do not, and in Zhukovsky they do not. In Pushkin, only a little; I remember just one passage where the drink appears: in “A Journey to Arzrum” a prisoner asked for a cup of coffee and to be spared questions. For the most part Alexander Sergeyevich was rather a devotee of champagne and sparkling wines, and the Russian public in general preferred sweet drinks, whereas coffee is drunk strong and black.

Coffee is an aristocratic whim, you will say. I shall reply, perhaps, with an example from literature. Take Krylov’s “The Coffee-House Keeper”, one of the first plays of the operatic type; he could not get it published for a long time, and I do not even know whether it was published in his lifetime. It tells of the keeper of a coffee house, a cheat and a rogue. Or take Melnikov-Pechersky: the Volga merchant Marko Danilych wanted to send his daughter to be educated in a hermitage and very bashfully asked the nun Makrina (her name is not from “wet” but from the Greek “makros”), in roughly this exchange: “My Dunya drinks coffee, what is to be done?” “And what is wrong with that?” “Why, mother, whoever drinks coffee is plotting wiles against God!”

A common proverb has it: whosoever dares to drink coffee, in that man there shall be wiles and cunning, and the Lord Himself shall not be. Yes, not the most pleasant assonance: “kofiy”, “kofe” (“kof”) and “kov” (“kovy”), that is, evil intrigues, tricks, machinations. And machinations, as usual, from abroad.

Nikolai Ushakov had a poem like this:

Winter of love to the rescue,  
the trotter champs the bit,  
and, ah!  
the Moscow spendthrift lass  
on light little doves  
of the Zamoskvorechye district.  
The glass ash of winters  
shake from the shaggy sleigh-rug  
and straight to the shop.

A French confectioner girl,  
burring her r’s to the starlings in tune,  
brings,  
having wiped the little table,  
pearly chocolate.

And lips in egg-nog,  
and the neighbour says:  
“Spendthrift lass,  
is it not rather much?”  
And again snow and light.

*Literal translation*

Chocolate enjoyed far greater favour than coffee. But the truly Russian drink is, of course, tea. And since I am, after all, not the most traditional Russian, and a bit of a Moscow spendthrift lass besides, at “Kofemania” I invariably choose my favourite raf “Moss”, which, incidentally, was invented in Moscow. Do try it, only take care that your lips do not end up in egg-nog; that is from another opera.