The Empty Bottle Must Leave the Table

The bottle is finished. In a British kitchen it might stay on the table as a trophy or a reminder to recycle. In a Russian kitchen someone will already be putting it on the floor. Jennifer Monaghan’s Moscow Times list of living superstitions is plain: wine or vodka, it does not matter; empties go down. Wikipedia’s page on Russian superstitions, citing etiquette books by Lloyd Donaldson, Anna King, and Simon Richmond’s Lonely Planet Russia, records the same ban, and a cousin: do not toast with an empty glass; if you do, you finish the bottle you last poured from. The table, in this grammar, is for what can still be poured. The floor is for what is over.

Makovsky’s boyars raise cups over a swan and a century of costume. The painting knows that drink and ceremony share a table. It does not tell you where to put the bottle. The custom that does is newer, in the story people tell about it, than the feast. Monaghan prints the legend: Cossacks in Paris in 1814, after driving Napoleon back, noticed that restaurateurs charged by the empty bottles left on the table rather than by the bottles ordered, and so hid them underneath. They brought the dodge home. Treat that as what it is: a story attached to a habit. It may explain a joke. It does not prove 1814. What can be sourced as present tense is the habit itself, still offered to foreigners as something they will get wrong at a first dinner.

The glass that still has a job

Toasting is the other half of the same table. Hillwood Museum’s note on Konstantin Makovsky’s 1883 A Boyar Wedding Feast describes a staged old-Russian toast: guests call горько, горько — bitter, bitter — because the wine is supposed to have turned, and the couple must kiss to make it sweet again. That canvas is costume history, a nineteenth-century dream of boyars. The living echo is smaller and louder. At weddings people still shout горько. At ordinary tables people still wait for a speech before the first sip. An empty glass, in the etiquette books Wikipedia lists, is not a vessel for a toast. You pour, you speak, you drink. You do not lift air and call it a wish. If the bottle dies during the speech, it leaves the table. A full one replaces it. The floor accumulates glass. Nobody thinks this is elegant. Everybody thinks the table should look as if the evening were still possible.

Maximov’s peasant wedding is the other temperature of the same sitting. An izba packed to the benches, a table that has already begun, a stranger at the door. Hillwood’s boyars are a dream of the seventeenth century. This room is the nineteenth century looking at a village feast it could still visit. The rule about the empty bottle is not in either picture. Both pictures know what the rule is protecting: a table that must go on looking unfinished.

Kustodiev’s Moscow tavern is teapots as much as vodka, a public room built for duration. Nothing on that table is spent. A modern kitchen will be less painted and more crowded with bottles that have done their work. The Levada survey Monaghan cites — more than half of Russians reporting belief in omens in 2013 — is background, not a law. People who believe in nothing will still move the empty. They will also, often, refuse to clink with a glass that has gone dry. The two rules feel related even when the origin stories do not match. One is about not displaying the end of the drink as a centrepiece. The other is about not asking a wish to live in a cup that has already been exhausted.

It doesn’t matter if your drink of choice is wine or vodka — to avoid bad luck, you should always put the empties on the floor.

How to hold the bottle

When the last pour has left the bottle, set it on the floor, against a wall, out of the way of feet. Do not stand it back among the plates. Do not toast with a glass you have drained; ask for a drop more, or raise it only if the table’s own rules, that night, are looser than the books. Decline drink if you need to, early and without theatre: the toast is the social act, the ethanol is optional more often than folklore admits. Our tea story is about a table that lasts. This one is about a table that refuses to exhibit its dead soldiers. The Cossacks in Paris may never have existed as accountants. The floor in the kitchen exists. Use it.