BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 896, 5 October 1956, Page 13

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

RUSSIAN WIFE GOES WEST, by Tanya Ps 2 mae Victor Gollancz, English price ANYA MATTHEWS was one of the rare "real post-revolutionary Russians" to be permitted to marry a foreigner and leave Russia in 1944. Her husband, Ronald Matthews, was Moscow correspondent of the Daily Herald. Western Europe, says Mrs, Matthews in Russian Wife Goes West, had always been officially presented as a nightmare. The reality, as she experienced it, is entertainingly described with a freshness of observation which mitigates the fragmentary nature of the book, She became in great demand as a lecturer and broadcaster, for what she could tell people about ordinary daily life in her country. The error that practically everyone fell into when discussing Russia, she decided, was to use terms which meant one thing in the West and something totally different in the U.S.S.R. Such words as "democracy," "liberty" and "co-operation" were used in great earnest, and in very different senses by both sides, This misunderstanding went right down the scale to the question: "Are Russian women fond of gardening?" She had to explain that Russian women didn’t know what gardening, in an Englishwoman’s sense, meant. Tanya Matthews was commissioned by several newspapers to interview some of the refugees and "defectors" from Russia, who lived in camps in Western Germany. Her tragi-comic account of this organised world of exiles, and the lack of imagination with which they were treated by Western officials, makes this part of the book an authorix eh Or

ative ana moving aocument:

C.