Future bestseller from Pamela Travers. Travel to the USSR without orchestras and myths

MOSCOW. Publishing house "Limbus-press" has released a book by Pamela Travers about a trip to Russia, previously not published in it.

Pamela Lyndon Travers’s book “Moscow Excursion” was published in 1934, but the Russian translation was published only in 2016. It’s a paradox, but the book didn’t reach one sixth even during the years of perestroika, when newspapers, magazines and the television that joined them barely kept up with the shaft of revelations and overthrows of former idols. Over the past 82 years, the book has not lost one iota of relevance, and some paragraphs can be mistaken for freshly written notes on the topic of the day.

Reflecting on Moscow, Travers says that time here seems to be reversed, about the clear orientation of the country of the Soviets to the East, in contrast to the rest of the world, directed to the West. About propaganda that effectively and talented introduces into the citizens’ mind the priority of the idea of building an ideal communist society over the possibility of a stable and well-fed life.

Travers’ first book is doomed to become a bestseller, as is its famous Mary Poppins.

Of particular value to the book about the life of the Soviet capital in 1932 is the fact that it was written by an emigrant who was not offended by the Soviet government, who was not accustomed to local realities, a citizen of the country of the Soviets and not met with excesses by an imported celebrity. Complimentary reviews of a trip to the USSR left by Bernard Shaw, Leon Feuchtwanger and several other literary grandees, written under the impression of gala receptions, orchestras, meals in decent restaurants and the goodwill of high-ranking officials. The novice writer Pamela Travers was not a significant character for the party bosses, so she turned out to be the unbiased outside observer whose opinion can be trusted to a much greater extent.

Travers did not plan a trip as part of a regular tourist group in order to denigrate or praise what she saw. Her book is an unflattering statement of facts. The scarcity of life of ordinary people, their drowsy humility, hours of food queues, lack of the most necessary, vigilant cheeks of the Cheka, hard slave labor without decent pay and prospects. Humble intellectuals from the former, forced to ask for alms on the porch.

Elena Tanakova © Gallerix.ru