Ingredients of Change: The History and Culture of Food in Modern Bulgaria by Mary C. Neuberger (review)

Superfluous Women is remarkable for its blend of erudite theory, close analysis of visual culture and personal experience. The author’s first-hand engagement with the people and events she discusses facilitates a unique and well-balanced insight that any scholar of contemporary Slavonic studies should welcome. The only critique of Superfluous Women possible is that its richness of material begs for expansion; an entire monograph could have been dedicated to any one of Zychowicz’s chapters. Given the text’s 2020 copyright mark, references to the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine are few but always pertinent. Superfluous Women draws our attention to the fact that, despite the current narrative of Russian nineteenth-century imperial ambition, Ukraine’s twenty-first-century unofficial art, politics and feminism are all alive and kicking.