Odette Keun (1888-1978) by Monique Reintjes (review)

Abstract

742 SEER, 79, 4, 200I unprepossessing Siberian city of Omsk (sometimes jokingly deciphered as Otdalennoe mestossyl'nykh i katorzhnykh, p. 20). Kicking off from Anna Wierzbicka 's statement that 'Soulcan always be translated into Russian as dusha, while the reverseis not true' (p. ix), Pesmen uses her trainingin anthropology and ethnography as well as her good (if not perfect) command of Russian to investigate some of the superficialand some of the deep manifestationsof the souls of people in the RSFSR/RF in the I990s. This naturally requires an examination of the importance of the bania,blat,sitting together at table, drinking,exploiting loopholes in the Soviet 'system'(and post-Soviet bardak); singing, inter-strata relationships and, especially, byt.These analyses could have been edited into clearer English, but even where the meaning is somewhat opaque the general drift is always clarified by the numerous quotations from the cross-section of the Siberian population with whom Pesmen has chosen to spend a good deal of her life. During the last eighteen months your reviewer has himself done time in three areas of provincial Russia several hundred miles to the east, south and north of Moscow, and would liketo confirmthat most of the people he spoketo theresounded exactly like the inhabitants of Omsk. Nonetheless, Pesmen might disagree with my impressionthat the majorityof our conversationscould not conceivably have taken place with citizens of Europe (proper) or the USA (i.e. the Russian/ Eurasian soul is still verydifferentfrom the Western soul, however defined). My understandingof the interrelationshipbetween bytand dusha also appears to differ somewhat from Pesmen's. Struggling with the endless problems of Russian byttakes time away from nourishing one's own and other people's souls, but if (a very big if, of course) the daily grind was no longer such a burden would not Russians in general (like many of the notorious 'new Russians'in particular)forgetabout theirsoulsand become as boring and flat as many Westerners are said to be? Which is the greater threat to dusha,a multitudeor the virtualabsence of seriousand repellent bytovyeproblemy? This is a book for those who are capable of lateralthinkingand who realize that post-Soviet Russia is every bit as difficultfor foreignersto understandas was the Russia of the Soviet period. Department ofSlavonic Studies MARTIN DEWHIRST University ofGlasgou Reintjes, Monique. OdetteKeun (I888-I978). Privately published in The Netherlands.Availablefromm.reintjes@worldonline.nl.I58 pp. Illustrations . Index. Priceunknown. ODETTE KEUN is usually remembered as the mistress of H. G. Wells. Along with severalothers,she sharedWells'sbed after I924, untilbeing comprehensively ousted seven years later by Gorky's ex-mistress, Baroness Moura Budberg. Keun was, however, also a distinguished authoress who over her lifetime wrote more than twenty books, mostly autobiographical novels and travelogues. She was also a most vocal supporterof Wells'splans for a 'World Directorate' (paradoxically intended as a substitute for dictatorship), and, after the Second WorldWar, of a Union of Central Europe which would act REVIEWS 743 as a bufferbetween the ideological poles of capitalism and communism. She travelled extensively, from her birthplace in Constantinople via a novitiate in Franceand Italy, to Menshevik Georgia, the Soviet Union, North Africa and America, and thence to her final restingplace in Worthing, Sussex. Monique Reintjes has tracked Keun's career, almost literally, across Europe and beyond, and searched out all that survives of the written and oral evidence relatingto her biography, amoursand literaryactivity. Keun was a socialist and, after the title of one of her earliest novels, une femme moderne. She considered the hymen 'a nonsense', and made the heroines of her novels pay for their own meals (p. 22). She also had very little time for the Bolsheviks and was emphatically not a fellow traveller. As she herself wrote, the true condition of Soviet Russia, which she discovered in I921, 'brokeherheart'(p. 33).The presentworkdiscussesextensivelyKeun's travels in Georgia, both before and after the Red Army invasion, and, rathermore briefly,her forced sojournsin Sevastopol, Kharkov and Moscow in the early 1920s. It additionally recalls to scholarly attention the many vignettes, anecdotes and observations contained in Keun's several and now largely forgotten works on contemporary East European politics and society: most notably, MyAdventures inBolshevik Russia(I 923) andIntheLandoftheGolden...