MADAME RIMSKYKORSAKOFF

Hokitika Guardian, 7 June 1930, Page 2

MADAME RIMSKYKORSAKOFF

FROM LUXURY TO LAUNDRY

SYDNEY, May 23

Her Excellency Lady Stonehaven entertained at afternoon tea at Admiralty House recently an elderly woman whose hum ole occupation would not, in ordinary circumstances, give her the open sesamic door to Government House —the charming and cultured Maclaine Sophie RimskyKorsakoff, one of the old Russian aristocracy, and now employed as an ironer in a city la.ilnury.

Her Excellency certainly did the thing properly. Madame, behind 1 whose life is a poignant story of suffering and privation and loss under the Reds in. Russia, was not only invoted to afternoon tea at Federal Government House in Sydney with the sole surviving member of her family —a little daughter—but was conveyed to the vice-regal home overlooking the harbour in the Governor-General’s launch.

This pleasant-faced Russian lady has had more than her share of trouble, for since she came to Sydney her husband —a colcmei in the Russian Imperial Army under the old regime—and her elder daughter both have died. But she lias the supreme gift of being able to smile through everything, and says she is infinitely happier in free Australia, even as a laundry employee, than. amid the shambles of Red Russia, where she lost everything, and never knew what next was going to happen, There are people who. are rich without money, because they have that which money cannot always 'buy—-a genial, sunny, cheerful disposition, and a capacity for ‘‘smiling through.” Madame Bimsky-Korsakoff, once among the serial elect of nrtistocratio Russia, now a supremely happy and contented laundry worker, is one of them.