1937 café society: Eisenstein and Hemingway, kotletki and shchi ...

(We) stroll ... under the twilight plane-trees of Collins Street until we turn to enter Little Collins Street and the Café Petrushka. ... (through) a glass-panelled door streaming with the condensed breaths of Melbourne's 1937 intelligentsia—writers, musicians, painters, actors, dancers, and their hangers-on ... run by two young women, Minka, ... of Russian-Jewish parents ... and Jessie ... (who) must arise at unseemly hours to buy meat and vegetables at the Prahran and Victoria Markets. With the help of a part-time assistant cook, Minka and Jessie prepare the food in a ten-foot-square kitchen separated from the dining-room by green curtains. … I pay ... for kotletki golubtzi or lenivy shchi ... Minka is willing to give me poppy-seed rolls and a large bowl of borsch for lettering out menus in Cyrillic script ...

 … the paintings ... hung on the sweating green walls … are grimly abstract or murkily message-ridden as though to prove … amid the laughter and melodious teaspoons and the smell of coffee and cabbage that twentieth-century art is no more than a branch of revolutionary politics. ... Ah, those evenings of November 1937, when every second woman is dressed in cyclamen, with cyclamen-painted lips, and a tricorn of cyclamen silk tilted over the left eyebrow ... plucked thin as a penstroke. ... a shining beige face inside the lappets of their shining page-boy haircuts ... the shoulders of their garments padded square, and the gauntlets of their gloves fringed. 

Meantime the glass-panelled door of the Café Petrushka opens and shuts on the entrances and exits of Melbourne’s intelligentsia and decadentsia, leftists and gourmets, journalists and broadcasters, potters and actresses … and high-school teachers … ready and willing to buy tumblers of tea and scalenes of halva for any out-of-pocket intellectual who will bicker or agree with them on the Marx Brothers, Ernest Hemingway, Eisenstein, Grosz, Aldous Huxley … Lytton Strachey, Liam O’Flaherty, Picasso …

- Hal Porter, The Paper Chase, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1966