In fact, the outer Cape is rich with Russian associations. Like a scene from a Russian fairy tale, Alexandra Grabbe’s lovingly restored Wellfleet B&B Chez Sven tucks into the trees behind Route 6. In her sitting room hangs a portrait of her cousin Countess Elizaveta Grabbe, one of the first Russian supermodels. In a bookcase, “The Private World of the Last Tsar’’ shows images of the imperial family taken by her grandfather General Count Alexander Grabbe, a gifted photographer and aide de camp to Czar Nicholas II.
“Sixty one percent of Wellfleet is National Seashore,’’ Grabbe tells new arrivals. Besides the beaches, nature walks top her list of favorite things to do. Together, we looked for mushrooms at Bound Brook Island, where the trail network radiates from a Colonial homestead, Atwood Higgins House, to a woodland of gnomish pines twisting in fantastical array.
“The Pitch Pine barrens of the Cape have many fungal species in common with Boreal forest ecosys tems,’’ explains Bill Neill, coauthor with Arleen and Alan Bessette of “Mushrooms of Cape Cod and the National Seashore.’’ “Here, Russian-Americans find a mushroom of the genus Leccinum similar to one they call Podosinovic in their former homeland,’’ Neill says.
“My sister Sasha and I went mushrooming all during our childhoods,’’ Chavchavadze remembers. “Our grandmother taught us which ones to pick. The mushrooms would hang from the low kitchen ceiling on strings during the winter.’’ Her friend Galina Khatutsky, who emigrated from Russia in 1987, is a self-professed hunter-gatherer who enjoys mushrooming in the fall.
“It’s passed down in the family. My parents started it with me when I was a child,’’ says a friend of Grabbe’s whose Russian parents also fled the Bolshevik Revolution.
