The Russian Countess

"This is a book by the mother of my Russian teacher at Winchester, who was a very small boy indeed when he left Russia – I think about two years old. What struck me most of all is the last third or so of the book, which is the years from the 1917 revolution until she finally managed to escape the country. She becomes this extraordinarily resourceful woman with a remarkable gift for saying the right thing to the right person at the right time. She’s stuck in Moscow, she’s already got her children out of the country but she’s finding it more and more difficult to get out herself. She doesn’t have any literary pretensions and she tells this story absolutely straightforwardly, but there are moments when her writing attains an almost mythical quality. The story I always tell people about this book is when she’s in Moscow in 1920 and she’s in complete despair and thinks she’s never going to be able to join her children and she’s cut off from her husband (they all left the country and she went back in the mistaken hope that she might be able to get a little bit more money by selling her house and the remaining possessions, and she couldn’t get out again), it’s winter and she thinks she wants to die. So she walks out through the outskirts of Moscow into the forest, because she wants to die there, and towards her, coming out of the forest, is this rather tired-looking man. He turns out to be a German – God knows what he’s been doing in the forest – half-starved and on his last legs and he turns to her, desperate for help, overjoyed that she understands German. So this poor woman, instead of going into the forest to die, gets lumbered with having to rescue this German. She takes him back into the centre of town and finds him shelter and food, and so they save each other’s lives. It has a sort of fairy-tale quality. Well, it’s the 1920s and the Soviet-Polish war is already going on, so getting across the frontier into Poland is obviously not easy. She first of all manages to join an orchestra – she’s quite a good amateur violinist – and the orchestra is travelling out of Moscow to somewhere in Belarus and then the Poles are advancing so the orchestra is going to get evacuated eastwards, which is the last thing she wants because she needs to get closer to the front line. She manages to persuade someone to take her on as a Red Army nurse because she’s got a bit of first aid knowledge. She joins a Red Army troop train and gets posted to the front. There’s one man, a member of the Party, who is in her coach and he obviously likes her but is suspicious of her. For all her resourcefulness she seems to have some aristocratic habits that she’s unable to rid herself off, so he’s surprised at the way she washes in the morning. She washes her face with great delicacy and he questions her about this and he does more or less guess who she is, but he lets it pass."