Bottle Of Vodka Research Articles

The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am by Kjersti A. Skomsvold

Chad Harbach The Art of Fielding Little, Brown This novel marks Harbach’s fiction debut. The book, a coming-of-age novel set in the United States, follows five baseball teammates and their experiences in college . Treating issues of love, ambition, and friendship, this debut novel asks both characters and readers to confront their inner selves, questioning the hopes, anxieties, and frustrations they find within. Andrei Gelasimov Thirst AmazonCrossing After being injured in a tank fire, protagonist Kostya secludes himself in his apartment , and his only companions are bottles of vodka that are stacked anywhere there is space. When army friends return seeking Kostya’s help, Kostya is confronted with his past, the very thing that has kept him secluded for so long. It is in these confrontations that Kostya is able to look deep within and find himself, coming to terms with his loss. Gelasimov is the winner of the 2009 Russian National Bestseller Literary Award for his novel, The Gods of the Steppe, forthcoming in English translation. Nota Bene Assommons les pauvres! is a powerful portrait of the tensions of someone trying to fit into a different culture , who is both aware of her own cultural superiority and of the suffering of her compatriots. Sinha’s style is poetic, filled—perhaps overfilled at times—with metaphors. She measures her words, as if rolling cherries in her mouth before chewing them. The government office is a “factory for lies.” Assommons les pauvres! has been nominated for several literary prizes. The novel has also attracted attention because ofpra, the government office for protection of refugees, fired Sinha for going beyond limits in describing their work. ofpra assumed that the writer could be identified with the narrator, and that lack of sympathy for the refugees was a cause for her dismissal—a sad commentary on how literature can be misread. Adele King Paris Kjersti A. Skomsvold. The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am. Kerri A. Pierce, tr. Champaign, Illinois. Dalkey Archive. 2011. isbn 9781564787026 If melancholy can be sweet, then The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am is just that. Kjersti Skomsvold’s debut novel, which won Norway’s 2009 First Novel Prize, provides a brief, sentimental glimpse into what it means to be lonely. The gloom of such a weighty (and tried) theme is relieved, refreshingly, by the narrator, Mathea, an aging introvert who is charmingly naïve, occasionally funny, often whimsical, but always sad. Mathea Martinsen, fragile in mind, body, and soul, nears the sunset of her life. For reasons not fully explained, she is easily intimidated by the outside world, especially by other people. The causes are both real and imagined. At the grocery store, for example, cashiers ignore Mathea completely. For them, she represents just one face in a thousand that they will serve that day. This fact is devastating : “I just pack my groceries into my bag and go. And if I was kidnapped five minutes later, and the cops came by and showed him my picture, the boy would say he’d never seen me before in his life.” Even though she is desperate for attention from anyone, Mathea cannot muster the courage to engage anyone in conversation. The abyss between Mathea and the rest of the world is just too immense. The Faster I Walk reveals the sad trappings of life at its loneliest, but in such a way that does not depress. Mathea eagerly reads the newspaper each morning in order to discover who has died before her own time is up. That she has outlived the deceased instills a sense of pride, until Mathea realizes that while she lives and breathes, she is nobody. Only upon her death, when her name is printed in black and white, will she become someone. “An obituary would be proof of my existence,” she speculates , “and I wonder if I should send in my own obituary and tell the newspaper to hold on to it and print it when the time is right.” For a debut novelist, Skomsvold is deft at transporting the reader into the world of an imaginary other. The reader becomes so fully absorbed in Mathea’s brief arc that, when...

Letter from Russia: Minimal Price for Vodka Established in Russia from 1 January 2010

Drinking in binges was typical for alcohol consumption in the former Soviet Union (Jukkala, 2008). This pattern is changing today, especially in large cities such as Moscow. Young people, who seem to have on average more free time today, drink usually one to three cans of beer during an evening but not a bottle of vodka for three or for two, and then often another one, with beer, as it used to be in the 1970–1980s. Fortified wine (containing 17–19% of alcohol by volume), mostly an imitation of Port (named Portwein), was also consumed at that time, while a 0.75-l bottle per person (or more) was a usual dose. The popularity of Port, Madeira, Vermouth and other fortified wine imitations was due to their low price; but the quality, apart from the cheapest varieties, was usually not too bad. Many of such imitations were obviously natural products manufactured more or less on the basis of original methods. It should be noted, however, that the quality of alcoholic beverages, even of the same denomination, has always been better in Moscow than outside the capital (except for wine-producing areas in the South). Gatherings with female participation often preferred wine—dry, sweet or sparkling—which was inexpensive and sometimes of good quality. Vodka prices remained stable for decades. Matters changed in 1985 with the start of the anti-alcohol campaign, when the vodka price doubled and quality of alcoholic beverages deteriorated. After the campaign, together with inflation and transition to the market economy, the prices and quality levels of alcoholic beverages diversified. New sorts appeared and disappeared, the sorts and labels correlated poorly, great part of vodka and other spirits being of low quality. New sorts were sometimes good in the beginning but later worsened. Well-known Soviet-time wine and Cognac sorts disappeared, changed their taste or …

News and Notes

News and Notes

Testing the validity of the Danish urban myth that alcohol can be absorbed through feet: open labelled self experimental study

Objective To determine the validity of the Danish urban myth that it is possible to get drunk by submerging feet in alcohol.Design Open labelled, self experimental study, with no control...

Alcohol and cause-specific mortality in Russia: a retrospective case–control study of 48 557 adult deaths

SummaryBackgroundAlcohol is an important determinant of the high and fluctuating adult mortality rates in Russia, but cause-specific detail is lacking. Our case–control study investigated the effects of alcohol consumption on male and female cause-specific mortality.MethodsIn three Russian industrial cities with typical 1990s mortality patterns (Tomsk, Barnaul, Biysk), the addresses of 60 416 residents who had died at ages 15–74 years in 1990–2001 were visited in 2001–05. Family members were present for 50 066 decedents; for 48 557 (97%), the family gave proxy information on the decedents' past alcohol use and on potentially confounding factors. Cases (n=43 082) were those certified as dying from causes we judged beforehand might be substantially affected by alcohol or tobacco; controls were the other 5475 decedents. Case versus control relative risks (RRs; calculated as odds ratios by confounder-adjusted logistic regression) were calculated in ever-drinkers, defining the reference category by two criteria: usual weekly consumption always less than 0·5 half-litre bottles of vodka (or equivalent in total alcohol content) and maximum consumption of spirits in 1 day always less than 0·5 half-litre bottles. Other ever-drinkers were classified by usual weekly consumption into three categories: less than one, one to less than three, and three or more (mean 5·4 [SD 1·4]) bottles of vodka or equivalent.FindingsIn men, the three causes accounting for the most alcohol-associated deaths were accidents and violence (RR 5·94, 95% CI 5·35–6·59, in the highest consumption category), alcohol poisoning (21·68, 17·94–26·20), and acute ischaemic heart disease other than myocardial infarction (3·04, 2·73–3·39), which includes some misclassified alcohol poisoning. There were significant excesses of upper aerodigestive tract cancer (3·48, 2·84–4·27) and liver cancer (2·11, 1·64–2·70). Another five disease groups had RRs of more than 3·00 in the highest alcohol category: tuberculosis (4·14, 3·44–4·98), pneumonia (3·29, 2·83–3·83), liver disease (6·21, 5·16–7·47), pancreatic disease (6·69, 4·98–9·00), and ill-specified conditions (7·74, 6·48–9·25). Although drinking was less common in women, the RRs associated with it were generally more extreme. After correction for reporting errors, alcohol-associated excesses accounted for 52% of all study deaths at ages 15–54 years (men 8182 [59%] of 13968, women 1565 [33%] of 4751) and 18% of those at 55–74 years (men 3944 [22%] of 17 536, women 1493 [12%] of 12 302). Allowance for under-representation of extreme drinkers would further increase alcohol-associated proportions. Large fluctuations in mortality from these ten strongly alcohol-associated causes were the main determinants of recent fluctuations in overall mortality in the study region and in Russia as a whole.InterpretationAlcohol-attributable mortality varies by year; in several recent years, alcohol was a cause of more than half of all Russian deaths at ages 15–54 years. Alcohol accounts for most of the large fluctuations in Russian mortality, and alcohol and tobacco account for the large difference in adult mortality between Russia and western Europe.FundingUK Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, British Heart Foundation, International Agency for Research on Cancer, and European Commission Directorate-General for Research.

<i>Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1805-1932</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1805-1932 Jeffrey Brooks Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1805–1932. By Kate Transchel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. 224 pp. $35.00). What social ritual rivals drinking in Russian life? The answer is probably none. This is a book about a major issue in social and cultural history. The volume will strike a familiar note with anyone acquainted Russian social life or with its representation in the popular media. From the cheap lithographs of the mid to late nineteenth century known as the lubok to the melodramatic television serials of today, drinking has occupied a prominent place in representations of the social order. The author of this compact study explores two features of the phenomenon in the late Imperial and Soviet eras. The first involves patterns of drinking among workers and to a certain extent peasants as well. The second concerns the efforts of the government, the Church, and various reformers to manage the consumption of alcohol and in that respect control the lower classes. The study is arranged chronologically so that the two themes are somewhat entangled. The discussion of Russian drinking rituals and taverns is an illuminating feature of the book. The author distinguishes between the practices of rural and urban consumption, notes the rise of the tavern, and explains the uses of vodka as payment and reward into the Soviet era. She contrasts heavy drinking among peasants on Church holidays, at weddings, and on other noteworthy occasions with the more regular guzzling by workers. As she shows, the peasants operated in an economy of shame and honor in which alcohol was a key currency, and therefore peasant families needed to maintain a certain balance with their neighbors. The rise of a cash economy led to tavern drinking, however, which was of a very different sort. The taverns became emblematic of lower-class urban culture and a male preserve from which women were excluded except on holidays or when they had to haul their men folk home. Not surprisingly the use of liquor as a currency in an economy of scarcity became a characteristic feature of Soviet life, and new workers discovered they were expected to treat their better established colleagues and even pay for training with bottles of vodka. In fact, the author suggests that skilled workers commonly demanded vodka as payment for training their newly arrived colleagues from the countryside during the Five [End Page 809] Year Plan. In this respect, it would have been interesting to know something about the movement of vodka between the collective farms and the factories. In discussing the Soviet period, the author raises the issue of whether new workers were more likely to take to drink than established workers, an issue explored by Soviet authorities as well. She concludes that drinking was ubiquitous among all workers. Liquor was long a source of state revenue in Russia. The author describes the shift from the tax farming of vodka to an excise system by which distillers and retailers paid license fees and then to a state monopoly in which the distillers had to buy raw materials from the state and the state regulated standards and sales. She notes some interesting instances of lower-class protests and boycotts of liquor in response to high prices and low quality. She found that suspicions in the government and also the church that abstinence was linked with religious dissidence led officials for a time to promote moderate drinking. The author identifies this solution to the problem of mass drunkenness with the "tippling" theory according to which Russians needed to drink but with moderation (p. 41). The sad story that she tells encompasses various commissions and organizations designed to combat drunkenness, none of which made much difference. Neither of course did the few supposedly "dry" years during World War I. Interestingly, the author demonstrates how Soviet authorities also came to promote moderate drinking once they gave up on various programs to transform the culture and values of the working class. The chapter on propaganda reveals what was true in the press more generally, namely...

The Prose (and Cons) of Vodka

The Prose (and Cons) of Vodka Drawing extensively on his own first-hand experience as someone who came of age during the prolonged “stagnation” of the Brezhnev years, and then witnessed the upheavals of perestroika and the breakup of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and the wild-West capitalism of the 1990s under Yeltsin, the writer and journalist Dmitrii Stakhov explores the changing fortunes of vodka, Russia’s “alcoholic drink No. 1,” and its enduring significance as a symbol, “cultural yardstick,” and economic unit of exchange over the last quarter of a century in this hard-drinking and hard-pressed nation. Stakhov’s essay details Russians’ long love affair with vodka, as well their sometimes dangerous dalliances with various vodka substitutes (often of unknown or highly dubious origin) and their more recent infatuation, in a new era of seemingly unlimited consumer choice, with other, more manifestly “Western” alcoholic drinks (whiskey, beer, wine). Stakhov suggests that the recent shifts in drinking habits in Russia (with Russians developing more discriminating and highbrow tastes) has in certain important ways entailed a loss of cultural values and a diminished sense of community and camaraderie. No one looks after the local drunk any more, and no one is interested any longer in going in on the proverbial “threesome” of Soviet times (a bottle of vodka split three ways): now it is a Darwinian world of “every man for himself.” For better or worse the old poetry and mythos of vodka, Stakhov concludes, has died, replaced instead by the harsher (and less interesting) prose of the free market.

Determinants of adult mortality in Russia: estimates from sibling data.

It would be useful to have a quick and cost-effective method to study individual-level determinants of mortality in countries where reliable data are not available. We have modified indirect demographic methods and applied them to a population sample to investigate predictors of mortality in Russia. A national sample of the Russian population was interviewed in a cross-sectional survey. The participants were asked about characteristics of their eldest siblings, including their vital status, year of birth, and year of death (if deceased). The association between personal characteristics and mortality risk was estimated for 682 male and 698 female siblings (of whom 122 and 81, respectively, had died). In both sexes, mortality was strongly associated with smoking and low education. After adjustment for smoking and education, mortality was elevated in men and women who drank alcohol at least once a month. Mortality was also higher among in men who had been binge drinking (more than half a bottle of vodka per drinking session) at least once a week (adjusted risk ratio [RR] = 2.5; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.2-4.9) and in women who were binging at least once a month (RR = 3.9; CI = 1.1-14.5) compared with nonbinging. Similar associations with drinking were seen for cardiovascular deaths in men. Childhood social circumstances were not associated with mortality. The study of siblings appears to be a cost-effective alternative for estimating risk factors for mortality in literate populations. This study identified smoking, low education, and alcohol consumption (especially binge drinking) as risk factors for mortality in Russia.

Which Truth? Cultural Politics and Vodka in Rural Russia

********** After what level of alcohol consumption does an informant become unreliable? How do I distinguish between an emphatic opinion, delivered under the candor-producing influence of alcohol, and unrestrained hyperbole, wrought by intoxication? When should I stop taking notes? (And I'm sure some of you are wondering, At what point is the alcohol-consuming interviewer no longer reliable? On that, more later....) Why should I have voiced questions about alcohol and fieldwork? I wasn't plying my interviewees with bottles of vodka--they were alarmingly capable of doing that on their own. My problem was that I was doing fieldwork on conflicts over natural resources in rural Russia. Vodka is so much a part of daily life there that few--almost no--gathering takes place without shared libation (Figure 1). Additionally, I was asking people to discuss with me controversial matters, such as poaching or resistance to the establishment of a park, that could, on occasion, elicit immoderate responses. We hunt all of the time. They call me the Killer! When I go out hunting with my friends I always come home with pheasants and fowl. I shoot everything, even deer. We are all poachers here! No, my friends and I don't hunt anymore. There isn't that much left to hunt around here, some geese, ducks but not many deer. And it's the simple guys like me who are the ones who get fined if we're caught, so we just don't hunt. The quotations are from the same young man, and the seemingly irreconcilable statements were produced under very different levels of alcohol consumption. The first expression, full of a hunter's braggadocio, came as he was drinking. Its successor was issued in the cold light of day, and when he was stone sober. So, does he hunt all the time, or does he no longer hunt? (Maybe the answer is that he hunts some of the time.) Between an intoxicated boast and an unintoxicated wariness about admitting to illegal acts, how does a researcher know which statement more accurately reflects the actual behavior of an informant? Most researchers who look at hunting around a protected area will probably have had similar experiences. It's only natural that one doesn't admit to poaching. Of course, hunting isn't the only topic that elicits such contradictory statements. BACKGROUND Muraviovka Nature Park became, in 1992, the first private nature reserve in Russia since before the Soviet period. This 5,200-hectare wetland reserve, created through a cooperative effort of Russian, American, and Japanese organizations, protects nesting habitats for several endangered species of birds, including the red-crowned crane, the white-naped crane, and the oriental white stork. Muraviovka Nature Park was carved out of a larger, state-run wildlife refuge that lacked the resources to adequately protect breeding grounds for these birds. The land for the park was leased from the local, district-level government by a Russian nongovernmental organization (NGO) with moneys put up by a Japanese corporation. Additional funds from U.S. NGOS supported building construction, vehicle acquisition, and educational programs. The district government generally welcomed this moneymaking opportunity, but many officials in the provincial and village-level governments were strongly opposed to the establishment of an independent and private park. Some were against it for ideological reasons; others, for economic ones. Although the park was created within a refuge where hunting was already restricted, neighbors were afraid of losing all hunting rights. The hunting administration that managed the refuge was vehemently opposed to ceding control of any part of its territory to another organization. Some say that communist ideologues in the hunting administration were opposed to nonstate control over the land. Others suggest that the hunting administration was operating its own highly profitable, but quite illegal, hunting tours for local bigwigs in areas closed to hunting. …

Too Bad to Be True

I n Act Two ofJanusz Glowacki's The Fourth Sister, the reality created onstage dwells in regions of the poetic absurd. The General (played by the director), father of three daughters, sits with a bottle of vodka, immersed in childhood memories. Kolya, an orphan taken in by the General and sent to America to secure the three daughters a better start in life, has returned after just a few days, with only a few cents. Selling her wedding dress, purse, and watch, Tanya, one of the sisters, invested her entire fortune in his trip, so quite naturally she is feeling murderous towards him. Her dreams of a bright future across the ocean have disappeared irrevocably, like the vodka down her father's throat.

Corrupting the rule of law

A Russian, a Cuban, an American, and a layer are seated in the same compartment on a train. The Russian takes a bottle of vodka out of his luggage, pours some into a glass, drinks it, and firmly states: “In Russia, we have best wodka in the vorld, nowhere in the vorld you can find wodka as good as one we make in mother Russian. And, we have much of it, so much we can just throw it away like vater.” That said, the Russian opens the train's window and hurls the vodka out of the train. The others in the compartment are quite impressed. Then the Cuban removes a box of Havana cigars from his luggage, takes one, lights it, and begins to smoke. “In Kooba, we have de best cigars of de world, habanas, nowhere in de world are dere such many and good cigars, and we have much of dem also, such many dat we can just trow dem away.” Making that bold statement, the Cuban sends the box of Havanas the way of the vodka. Once again, the compartment's occupants are quite impressed. Then, not to be outdone, the American abruptly stands up, opens the window wide, and throws out the lawyer.

Pattern of Alcohol Drinking and Progression of Atherosclerosis

Most studies that examine the role of alcohol consumption in atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease have overlooked the possible effect of drinking pattern. We investigated the association between the habit of heavy acute intake of beer and spirits (binging) and the 4-year progression of carotid atherosclerosis in a population-based sample of middle-aged Finnish men. Data from the Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study (KIHD) were used to estimate changes in maximum and mean intima-media thickness (IMT) and the maximum plaque height in 764 KIHD participants who reported using beer and in 871 participants who used spirits. After adjustment for age, baseline carotid atherosclerosis, and average weekly alcohol consumption level, we observed the highest atherosclerosis progression in men who usually consumed a whole bottle of vodka or more in 1 session. For beer binging (>6 beers at a time), the magnitude of IMT progression was even higher, although this association was only marginally significant (P<0.1) because of smaller numbers. The associations were largely unaffected by adjustments for blood pressure, lipids, smoking, BMI, and medication. The magnitude of the difference was generally higher in a subgroup that was free of IHD at baseline. We conclude that the pattern of drinking associates with the progression of carotid atherosclerosis independently of the total level of alcohol consumption and risk factors.

The seven deadly curs’d sins … Intemperance

The seven deadly curs’d sins … Intemperance