If you like a splash of intelligentsia with your vodka, then the Russian Samovar serves your ideal cocktail. The long-standing bar, restaurant, and lit-magnet teams up with publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux — which counts no less than 21 Nobel laureates on its roster — for a night of reading and drinking. This evening features New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, whose comprehensive survey of 20th-century music, The Rest Is Noise, was published last fall; and novelist Rivka Galchen, who's currently promoting her debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, due out at the end of this month.