The Provincial Lady in Russia: I Visit the Soviets

by E. M. Delafield

Paperback, 1985

Status

Available

Call number

823.912

Series

Provincial Lady (5)

Genres

All Topics

General Fiction

Fiction

Publication

Academy Chicago Publishers (1985), Paperback, 344 pages

Description

These highly acclaimed, delightful novels are written in diary form by the Provincial Lady, who lives in a country house with her husband, two children, the children's French governess, Cook and a few assorted helpers. The era of the 1930s is wittily and shrewdly recreated with amusing illustrations. The P.L. finds herself slogging through the mud of a collective farm, coping with Soviet trains and hotels and almost literally rubbing shoulders with robust citizens at a public beach.

User reviews

LibraryThing member pamelad

Delafield's American publisher suggested that she go to Russia and write something funny about life on a collective farm. She needed the money so, against all inclination, she went. She travels with an odd assortment of people, most of them specialists of some description, but some of them, like

the lost and aristocratic Miss D, just interested in finding out what's going on and reproting back to their friends and acquaintances.

Delafield struggles to be fair about life in the Soviet Union, but she's depressed by the lack of freedom, the lack of privacy, the crowded conditions and, most importantly, by the fate of the Romanov's. Her travelling companions occupy two extremes: they love everything Soviet and think that this is the best of all possible worlds, or they loathe absolutely everything and everyone.

Intourist controls the places the tourists visit, and the people speak to so tightly that few of the experts are able to accomplish the research they had planned. Indeed, so repetitious and uninformative are most of the set visits, that Delafield writes mainly about her travelling companions.

"One can only congratulate the Government on the thoroughness with which it has seen to it that everyone coming into contact with foreign visitors upholds the theory that Soviet Russia has attained to earthly perfection within the last twenty years and has no longer anything to learn."

"Stories filter through, from time to time... Of people who try to get away and can't - of people who are serving long terms of forced labour, as prisoners...

This book was first published in 1937, a time when many British intellectuals were great supporters of the Soviet Union. Delafield was not one of them.

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LibraryThing member Welshwoman

I feel E M Delafield was marvellously intrepid and very brave to not only visit Russia but to spend time on a collective farm while she was there. It must have been hard to find anything amusing to say about Russia at this time, although she tries in her inimitable way. She is honest about the

situation in that period and her visit to the collective farm, where she lived for a short time, really illustrates how ghastly it must have been.

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LibraryThing member PennyAnne

A thoroughly interesting book about one woman's experiences in Communist Russia in the early 1930's. I visited the Soviet Union in 1987 and I can report that Intourist operated in exactly the same (ineffectual) manner then as it did during the time of Delafield's visit!

LibraryThing member wealhtheowwylfing

Like the other Provincial Lady books, this follows the carefully observed life and inner workings of a genteel British mother in the 1930s. Unlike the other books, this isn't actually funny. Her tales of early Soviet Russia are interesting at first, but tend to repeat themselves. This frank and

detailed look at the intersection of British and Soviet cultures, and the equally frank debate about communism and equality, makes this an interesting document. It's not a great read, though.

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