Odette Keun (1888–1978)
Author of I Discover the English
About the Author
Works by Odette Keun
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Keun, Odette
- Birthdate
- 1888-09-10
- Date of death
- 1978-03-14
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- Netherlands (passport)
- Birthplace
- Constantinople, Ottoman Empire [now Istanbul, Turkey]
- Place of death
- UK
- Places of residence
- Istanbul, Turkey
Netherlands
London, England, UK
Crimea, Russia
Moscow, Russia
Paris, France (show all 8)
Algiers, Algeria
Tiflis, Georgia - Occupations
- journalist
novelist
travel writer - Relationships
- Wells, H. G. (lover)
- Short biography
- Odette Keun was born in Constantinople (now Istanbul), the daughter of a Dutch diplomat, with mixed Dutch, French, Italian and Greek origins. Her family's first language was French and she was educated by an English nanny. After her father's death in 1902, when she was 13, she spent three years in a Roman Catholic boarding school in the Netherlands and two years as a novice nun in France. After she left the convent, she traveled widely in Europe and Bolshevik Russia. She wrote about her experiences in Russia, including having been arrested by the Cheka, in Sous Lénine: Notes d'une femme deporte en Russie par les Anglais (1922). Between 1924 and 1933, she was the lover of H.G. Wells, with whom she lived in Lou Pidou, a house they built together in Grasse, France. In the early 1930s, she recognized the dangers of totalitarianism and fascism and called other liberals "spineless" for failing to stand up to Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. She was the author of numerous nonfiction works including I Discover the English (1934) and A Foreigner Looks at the T.V.A. (1937). See also her biography by Monique Reintjes, Odette Keun (2004), published in Tbilisi, Georgia.
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- Works
- 6
- Members
- 10
- Popularity
- #908,816
- Rating
- 2.7
- Reviews
- 3
The British occupying forces in Constantinople arrested Keun and summarily deported her to Russia in June 1921. She never got an official explanation, but it seems fairly obvious that they had been annoyed by her support for the independent bolshevik republic of Georgia, where she was acting as a kind of PR consultant for the government (a bit like Graham Greene in Panama). The British were still scheming to try to keep the Russians out of the Caucasus at the time, and the presence of even a relatively obscure western communist journalist in Tiflis must have been an embarrassment to them.
Since all her papers, including her Dutch passport, had been confiscated by the British, Keun had a hard time explaining herself to the Soviet authorities when she arrived in Sebastopol, especially since post and telegraph services were basically inoperative and there was no Dutch diplomatic representative in Russia at the time anyway. She thus found herself being passed on from one Cheka outpost to the next over a period of three months, never quite a prisoner but never quite at liberty either, and got the chance to see a side of Russia in the immediate aftermath of revolution that was hidden from most visiting left-wing intellectuals. It's an odd mix of Doctor Zhivago and Nancy Mitford. She can be cool and analytical when she's describing the brutality of the system, the all-pervasive corruption, the ubiquity (even then) of the Cheka and the grinding poverty, dirt and hunger of a society that was still trying to sort out how to get industry, agriculture and public services working under communism. On occasion, her account descends to sheer comedy — intentionally when she deploys her rubber folding bathtub in the Sebastopol prison and takes a shower under the startled gaze of the guards and fellow-detainees, unintentionally when she lists the lack of domestic servants among the deprivations that make women's lives a misery in Kharkov. But there's always a lot of sympathy there for the Russians, and she herself comes over as very human when, tough as she obviously must have been, she has to admit that her experience brought her close to despair. There's a marvellous scene where she turns the full fury of an outraged French bourgeoise on a young Cheka interrogator in Moscow: she knows it's a stupid thing to do, but she's just so fed up she can't stop herself. Maybe that was what finally convinced them she wasn't a spy...
Keun wrote the French version of this book first, then adapted it herself into English: I read it in French. The first third of this is a wonderful tirade against the British authorities in Istanbul. I would imagine that "le capitaine H." and "le colonel M.", if they read it, must have felt they had been been reduced to two pairs of gently steaming army boots. It would be interesting to see how much it's toned down in the English version. She also has a go at the French mission in Tiflis before the revolution that must have had the libel lawyers rubbing their hands in gleeful anticipation...
Hindsight shows that she was pretty close to the mark with her analysis of the endemic weaknesses of the Soviet system, even though she didn't predict that Stalin and Hitler would between them manage to give it the impetus to keep going another sixty-odd years. She wasn't the only communist intellectual to lose her faith after exposure to what was happening in Russia, but she must have been one of the first. And there weren't many women of her generation who would have had the nerve to go off to the Caucasus on their own in the middle of a war. An interesting and intrepid character, definitely.… (more)