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Diary of a Russian Lady

Barbara Doukhovsky

This book was not intended to be published, and it is to accident that we owe its appearance. The author, from her childhood, followed affectionate advices and good examples, and noted every day her impressions of everything she saw and heard about her. She puts in these pages all the freshness and sincerity of her woman’s heart. Circumstances placed the author in the centre of remarkable events. Remaining faithful to the principle of not interfering with her husband’s business, she becomes, however, unwillingly, the spectatrix of particularly interesting facts: the outside of war, of different centres of Russian society, of exotic life in foreign colonies and on our remote frontiers, including the regions of the river Amour in Eastern Siberia. Our author does not pretend to give a thorough and complete study of political events and society customs. But here we have vivid pictures of different impressions which, linked together, give us a living picture of places, events, and persons; real life in fact is delineated in this book, which has thus become a considerable work. The author’s innate talent, her education, her faculty of observation, and her deep study of the best Russian and foreign writers, are the cause of the vivid impression produced by her light and clear style. Some portions of these studies entitled “Fragments of the Diary of a Russian woman in Erzeroum,” were printed in one of the most famous Russian periodicals. The welcome they received showed the author to what use she could turn her book for her works of charity, and it is her desire to assist the poor which gave to Barbara Doukhovskoy the idea of publishing her “Memories,” though the great realism of them did not permit of their publication as a whole. Profiting by the right of having been a friend and a playmate of the author’s husband, I insisted on the necessity of publishing this work. Not only by the truth and the spontaneity of her impressions, but by the profoundness of her observations and the artistic conception of the whole, the author of this book now embellishes our literature by a work of an exceptional and original character. - Summary by Constantin Sloutchevsky from the Preface.