Ingrid Bengis papers, 1930-2016

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Summary

Creator:
Bengis, Ingrid, 1944-2017 and Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture
Abstract:
Ingris Bengis was a white writer, poet, and fishmonger. This collection documents Bengis's life and work in New York City, St. Petersburg, Russia, and Deer Isle and Stonington, Maine. The collection includes drafts, poetry, and published works (including I Have Come Here to Be Alone and Metro Stop Dostoevsky). The bulk of this collection contains correspondence, including letters to and from Bengis, relating to her personal life; teaching; running Ingrid Bengis Seafood; and her 2003 court case regarding her Wooster Street Apartment in New York. Bengis's papers also include photographs of Bengis and her travels, clippings about Bengis as a writer and fishmonger, materials related to her teaching at St. Petersburg State University and Fulbright grant to Russia, as well as personal diaries, journals, and ledgers from her seafood business.
Extent:
14 Linear Feet (10 boxes)
Language:
Materials in English and Russian.
Collection ID:
RL.13130

Background

Scope and content:

Materials in this collection relate to the life and work of Ingrid Bengis, including her writing, teaching and seafood business. This collection is arranged into the following series: Personal, Ingrid Bengis Seafood, Writings, Correspondence and Journals and Printed materials.

This collection contains materials related to Bengis's personal life, including photographs of Bengis, her family and travels, subject files, clippings about Bengis, in Russia, Fulbright grant application and documentation, and materials relating to teaching English Literature at Saint Petersburg University. It also contains materials documenting her family relationships with her husband, Edouard Palei; her stepson; her foster daughter, Lori; her parents, Lew and Maria Bengis; and her brother, Steven Bengis.

Also contains materials relating to her seafood business, including ledgers, contracts, and correspondence. There are letters and menus from Thomas Keller and his New York City restaurant, the French Laundry. Also contains clippings about the business and the Bengis's client restaurants.

Additionally, this collection contains manuscripts and drafts of published works I Have Come Here to Be Alone and Metro Stop Dostoevsky, as well as drafts of an unpublished novel. It also contains drafts of published and unpublished fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Additional materials include international rights agreements for I Have Come Here to Be Alone and Metro Stop Dostoevsky, as well as unidentified drafts and writings.

This collection contains correspondence sent to and by Bengis, including letters sent to Bengis by painter Wilfried Kirschl, as well as general correspondence. Additional correspondence is organized by topic, including the death of her mother, and correspondence with literary agents. Additional materials include copies of printed works by Bengis, including international translations, as well as Bengis's personal journals from New York, Maine, and Russia, and her college notebooks and address books.

Biographical / historical:

Ingrid Bengis was a white writer, poet and fishmonger. Born in 1944 in New York to Russian émigrés Maria and Leonid Bengis, she first rose to prominence in the literary world for her 1972 work, Combat in the Erogenous Zone: Writings on Love, Sex and Hate. Combat was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1973. She published her second novel, I Have Come Here to Be Alone, in 1977. She taught at several universities throughout the 1970s, including the New School for Social Research and University of Massachusetts Amherst, and was a guest lecturer at several others. In 1970, Bengis purchased a property in Stonington, Maine, and relocated there after the publication of Combat in the Erogenous Zone.

During the early 1980s, Bengis began picking and shipping chanterelles and lobsters to Balducci's Market in New York City. She founded Ingrid Bengis Seafood in 1984. Working directly with local fishermen near Deer Isle, Maine, she shipped lobsters, peekytoe crab, scallops, mussels and oysters to prominent restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, and Denver. She worked with celebrity chefs of the 1980s and 1990s, including Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and Wolfgang Puck. Bengis hand packed and shipped the seafood from Bangor International Airport and encouraged her chefs to include the names of the fishermen on their menus.

In 1995, Bengis was awarded a Fulbright to work on a memoir of her travels and experiences in Russia during the early 1990s. She would go on to spend parts of each year in Russia, teaching American literature at St. Petersburg State University. In 1998, she married Edouard Palei, a Russian former ballerino. They split their time between Russia and Stonington, Maine. Bengis returned to writing with the 2003 publication of Metro Stop Dostoevsky: Travels in Russian Time, a memoir of her experiences of Russia in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Bengis died in Maine in 2017.

Sources: "The Catch", New York Times, 2010 October 10. Accessed 2025 April.

"The Way We Live Now: Encounter; The Odd Lady and the Sea", New York Times Magazine, 2003 May 11. Accessed 2025 April.

"Writer Who Procured Fresh Maine Seafood for Renowned Chefs Dies", Bangor Daily News, 2017 July 27. Accessed 2025 April.

Acquisition information:
The Ingrid Bengis papers were received by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book Manuscript Library as a gift in 2018.
Processing information:

Processed by Colette Harley, April 2025.

Accessions described in this collection guide: 2018-0112.

Titles were devised by the processing archivist, except where noted in the collection. The collection was rehoused upon arrival at the Rubenstein, and folders were disassembled and reassembled based on topic or theme. For the writing series, titles and dates were drawn from the drafts where possible. Loose or unidentified writings were gathered in folders labeled "unsorted and undated". Manuscripts were housed in black clip books and manuscripts were foldered by the processing archivist. Some correspondence was housed in clamshell boxes by Bengis by date. These were rehoused into archival folders. Additional correspondence was sorted by year by the processing archivist.

Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Contents

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Restrictions:

Access note. Some materials in this collection are electronic records that may need to be reformatted. Access copies of electronic records require special equipment. Contact Research Services for access.

Terms of access:

The copyright interests in this collection have not been transferred to Duke University. For more information, consult the Rubenstein Library's Citations, Permissions, and Copyright guide.

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Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Ingrid Bengis Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

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