There was an awful lot I liked about #WarAndPeace, but one #samover culture really stands out. We've all seen samovars somewhere, maybe in a museum or a curio shop, but how was it actually used? There's that scene, for example, in the first epilogue where "Sonya presided over the samovar" at the Rostov family gathering. At one point, Nicholas and Denisov went to "fetch more tea from Sonya -- who sat weary but resolute at the samovar."
The cultural assumptions bound up in that passage escape me.