Re: how tall was Evgenia?


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Posted by Peter Ceresole on August 04, 2003 at 22:00:32 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.

In Reply to: how tall was Evgenia? posted by Katharine Edgar on August 04, 2003 at 18:40:24:

From the photos she seems to have been tall; didn't he refer to her elsewhere as "a tall, jolly girl"? Still, 6'3" is a bit extreme. Of course in Racundra, AR called her 'the cook' and made quite a few joking references to her while carefully avoiding any description of what she was like otherwise. I remember as a child reading Racundra and being totally mystified by the figure of the cook. It obviously stood for something significant but I couldn't understand what on earth it could be. But then that was very much a tradition of the time when men were writing about female travelling companions, no matter what their relationship. And to begin with when they were living together in Reval he was still married to Ivy, so discretion was necessary. But all that went totally over my seven year old head.

It was years before I read Ian Fleming's (not that one) book about travelling in Tibet with the Swiss photographer Eva Maillart. He made a mystery of her name, went on at great length about how they didn't fall in love and suddenly the penny dropped retrospectively about the cook and Racundra. It was the kind of odd thing that grown-ups did...

Curiously, Racundra left a great impression on me; one of the first things I did in Helsinki two years ago was to have a look for the Nylands Yacht Club; I failed to find the dolphin where they swung the compass. But it had given me a head start in understanding the history of Baltic politics when the Soviet Empire came unstitched.


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