Dear all,

I want to draw your attention to a remarkable book by Edith Sollohub: The Russian Countess: Escaping Revolutionary Russia.
It is published by Impress Books.  Some of you may have seen a review by Antony Beevor in the Sunday Times:
<http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article6953168.ece>

Here is what I have just sent myself to amazon.co.uk. as a customer review:

“Many memoirs have been written during the last hundred years by resourceful, heroic individuals who managed to escape persecution in different parts of the world.  Every such story deserves to be told, but few of us have time to read all of them.  Edith Sollohub’s memoir stands out because she was endowed with a variety of gifts that are not often found together. Not only was she uncommonly intelligent and courageous, not only was she gifted with an insight that enabled her to make the right choice in countless situations where the wrong choice would have meant death, but she also had the ability to write vividly and with understanding about all the many people, from very different walks of life, whom she encountered during her journey through post-revolutionary Russian.  And here is what she writes about her own feelings as, during the Soviet-Polish War of 1920, she prepares to escape into Polish-controlled territory: ‘Once more I have to say my lines with ease, calm and assurance.  But the lines I have to say are in no book, no author wrote them for me, no older actor taught me how to move on this stage where everything is irrevocable, where there is no second chance, where every word and every move are so deadly dangerous.’ ”

I write to the list not only because of the book’s intrinsic interest but because there may well be other members who remember either the Countess herself or her son, Count Nicholas Sollohub.  He was an unusually gifted and imaginative teacher.  He was my first teacher of Russian and I owe him a great deal.

Vsego dobrogo,

Robert Chandler