ganymedesrocks:

Although also used in Turkey, Iran and Central Asia, the samovar is undoubtedly at the center of Russia’s tea culture; a culture that remains today, one to assemble one our world’ largest consumers of tea.   Even if its origins are shrouded in mystery, the very first samovar factory opened in Tula, a metalworking town south of Moscow, in 1778.  As the demand for samovars grew and even more factories opened, the town became almost synonymous with samovar production.  In the 1800′s, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy and other great Russian writers began using the samovar as a symbol of the nation’s culture itself.  Gogol’s Dead Souls in particular, is filled with references to samovars.  As he describes one character with high social aspirations, “Having become an agent, he quite naturally did as all agents do, kept company and made friends with the better-off villagers, levied higher taxes on the poorer families, got up at nine o’clock in the morning, waited for the samovar, and drank tea.“  As historian Audra Jo Yoder writes, this was a time when “cultural elites articulated a national identity that established hospitality and communalism as two of its central tenets.” It may be that beloved literature is just as responsible as common usage for championing the samovar as a symbol of Russia.  When it comes to exemplifying “Russian-ness,” few items do it better than the samovar.