Roman Kaplan was ecstatic in October when Dmitry Muratov, editor of the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and a close friend for 25 years, won the Nobel Peace Prize . The two made plans to celebrate at Mr. Kaplan’s restaurant in New York, the Russian Samovar, on Nov. 22.
But five days before their rendezvous, Mr. Kaplan died of heart failure in Aventura, Fla., where he spent his winters, his stepdaughter, Vlada Von Shats, said. He was 83.
Mr. Muratov went to the Samovar as planned that day — but for a wake. In the front of the restaurant, atop the white piano that Mikhail Baryshnikov had given to the place, sat a portrait of Mr. Kaplan, along with fresh flowers, a glass of vodka and a slice of black bread.
“These days it’s commonly said of a notable person’s passing that an era died with him,” said Mr. Muratov, who raised money to save the Samovar during one of its many near-death experiences. “But Roman would have shrunk away from such banality. More precisely, he created a scene all his own. He transformed culture into friendship and friendship into culture.”
From the time it opened in 1986, the Samovar , at 256 West 52nd Street, was less a restaurant than a civilization in exile, a refuge for writers, artists, musicians, dancers and poets who, like Mr. Kaplan himself, had either fled from or been banished by the Soviet Union. Everything that had been lacking there — joy, conviviality, free and uninhibited speech — abounded at the Samovar.
Presiding over it all, through fires, floods and a bankruptcy, from a table strewn with magazines and books, was Mr. Kaplan, an urbane figure with a closely-cropped beard and intelligent eyes, a man who could recite Pasternak and Mandelstam from memory and was one of the few whom the notoriously picky Joseph Brodsky entrusted to read his own poetry aloud.
Mr. Kaplan, who was also fluent in English, French, German and Hebrew, named the restaurant after the distinctive shiny Russian teapots around which Russian culture and family life have traditionally revolved. The place was filled with them, one purchased from a flea market in Queens and carried by hand to the Samovar by the Russian novelist Sergei Dovlatov.
“We did not say, ‘We are going to the Samovar’; we said, ‘We are going to Roman,’” the modernist sculptor Ernst Neizvestny once said. To the writer Anatoly Naiman, a friend of Mr. Kaplan’s from Leningrad, encountering exiles at the restaurant was like having friends come back from the dead.
The Samovar’s most honored guest by far was Brodsky, another friend from Leningrad. It was he who bailed out the restaurant with money from his Nobel Prize for Literature and recruited Mr. Baryshnikov to help. Mr. Kaplan set aside a banquette for him: Table 16, in the back. The Samovar’s longtime pianist, Alexander Izbitser, a graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory, knew to play more quietly when the soft-spoken Brodsky was there, the easier for people to hear what he was saying.
Once Brodsky marked up the Samovar’s menu with his rhymes. (“You won’t be erring/With Russian herring” was one.) He also wrote of Mr. Kaplan in verse both serious and silly.
Winter! Tonight in NYC
It’s colder than the moon by far.
Dear vodka and sweet caviar
Should warm us up — where else to be
But Kaplan’s Russian Samovar?
Mr. Kaplan’s diplomatic skills were legendary, but there were limits. He looked on helplessly one night as Brodsky rebuffed an overture from the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko , whom Brodsky blamed in part for his forced exile, believing Yevtushenko had been compromised by his ties to the Soviet regime.
For years, habitués and visitors inscribed entries — poems, prose poems, drawings, doodles — in the scrapbooks Mr. Kaplan kept. At an auction in Moscow in 2018, the Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut paid $230,000 for the collection, and a generation of Russian creativity was repatriated.
“Roman is our Rick,” the Russian writer Solomon Volkov once said, referring to Humphrey Bogart’s restaurateur in “Casablanca.” Rick rarely drank with guests, but Mr. Kaplan invariably did, plying them with his trademark homemade vodkas (coming in horseradish, cilantro, dill and various fruit flavors, among others). His penchant for picking up checks very nearly sank the place.
For someone who came close to starving during the wartime siege of Leningrad, running a restaurant presented unique challenges, like his horror over wasted food. The frostbite Mr. Kaplan suffered during the war left him with both a limp and impatience for pettiness. The Polish émigré writer Irena Grudzinka Gross recalled Mr. Kaplan removing his shoe once to show a condescending professor where his toes had been.
Mr. Kaplan closed the Samovar twice yearly, to mark Brodsky’s birthday and the anniversary of the poet’s death , at his home in Brooklyn in 1996 at age 55. Table 16 would be turned into a shrine, complete with framed photographs. It was generally off-limits to casual diners but available to V.I.P.s like Philip Roth , another regular.
The Samovar’s longtime hostess, Olga Galkin, still recalls Mr. Roth arriving unexpectedly one night to find Table 16 occupied by the writer Francine du Plessix Gray , who was friendly with Mr. Roth’s former wife Claire Bloom. He spent the evening glowering from a more pedestrian table across the room.
Fearful after Brodsky’s death that the place would devolve into a kabak — a watering hole — Mr. Kaplan arranged for regular readings both by other Russian exiles and young American writers. Most were held upstairs, in a room co-designed by Lev Zbarsky, son of Lenin’s chief embalmer. “A real literary salon,” Michael Idov called the Samovar in Snob, a Russian-language magazine, in 2009.
Mr. Kaplan, a teacher when he lived in Russia, had been conspicuous in gray 1950s Leningrad, a book by Sartre (in the original French) sticking out of a pocket of his brown suede coat. With his language skills he was, according to the author Ludmila Shtern, one of the few Russians of that time and place who dared speak to Westerners, and could.
Spotting the Black cast of “Porgy and Bess” on the Anichkov Bridge in Saint Petersburg during its 1957 tour, he talked with Truman Capote, who was with the group. When Leonard Bernstein toured the Hermitage two years later, it was Mr. Kaplan who showed him around, then wrote him afterward. His note was promptly intercepted, and a Leningrad paper labeled Mr. Kaplan a “navoznaya mukha” — a fly on manure.
The denunciation sent him fleeing, first to Moscow, later to Israel, and, in 1977, to New York, where he worked as a doorman and porter before managing an art gallery. Tiring of cleaning up after the meals he gave for friends, Mr. Kaplan’s wife, Larissa Kaplan, dared him to open a restaurant, and he did. She survives him, along with Ms. Von Shats, now the Samovar’s general manager; a brother, Anatoly; and three grandchildren.
Mr. Kaplan, who lived on the Upper East Side, retired in 2011 but continued to come into the restaurant a few times a week.
A campaign to name the Samovar’s block, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, after Mr. Kaplan is already underway. Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher of The Nation, has loaned the Samovar a half-million dollars to tide it over until federal pandemic relief arrives. She and her husband, the Sovietologist Stephen F. Cohen, who died last year , were also regulars there.
Ms. Von Shats plans to install Mr. Kaplan’s photo at Table 16, though not quite yet. “The picture I have of him is bigger than Brodsky’s, and he wouldn’t want that,” she explained.
Ever since Carrie Bradshaw and an artist (played by Baryshnikov) had a date at the restaurant, fans of “Sex and the City” sometimes stop by. Far more common are tourists from Moscow.
“Everyone comes first to the Samovar,” said Alexander Genis, a writer friend of Mr. Kaplan’s. “The Statue of Liberty they can see from the plane.”
Source : food
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