Page 14 - February 2021

STORY OF A PLATE
STORY OF A PLATE
STORY OF A PLATE

N I N A K O S S M A N

A p e r s o n a l e s s a y a b o u t t w o o b j e c t s
f r o m m y S o v i e t c h i l d h o o d - P a r t 2
Do you see this
plate? It may look
like a regular plate

to you, nothing very
special, but to me
this plate brings
memories of a whole
set of such plates:
some plates were
the same size, some
bigger, some
smaller. In my
Moscow childhood
this set ("serviz" in
Russian) was
reserved for
holidays, and it
stood in a “servánt”,
a kind of cupboard that many Russian families
had in Moscow and, I’m sure, not only in
Moscow, but as I speak only of what I know
from my own experience, I say “Moscow”. Our
servánt was nothing special really: it was
made of wood, with two sliding glass doors,

and several glass shelves inside. These holiday
plates were treated as something precious,
not unlike rare rocks in my collection of
minerals that boasted of rarities such as
lazurite, calcite, and malachite in their natural
form. My parents took these holiday plates
out of the servánt only on special days, when
we had guests, and I remember that on those
days there was a small “table for children”,

14
litterateur February 2021