Ebook: Sun and Snow. A Siberian Adventure

The Odyssey of a British girl in Siberia before the Revolution.
London: Longmans, 1963. - 158 c.
Скан 600 dpi.Довольно необычное описание жизни молодой ирландки в предреволюционной Сибири.
Here is the story of a British family living in a vast, beautiful country - an account of life in Siberia from an unusual angle - during the years when the old Russia died and the new regime was born.
Doreen Stanford writes: ‘Pre-Revolutionary Russia has suffered much misrepresentation from fiction writers. Most people can recall novels depicting wastes of snow populated by wolves, chained convicts and villainous aristocrats in sable coats. My Siberian pictures are of another sort.
Her father was an enterprising mining engineer who liked to see the world. Her mother gallantly tackled the varied and often bizarre problems of housekeeping under handicaps which would have daunted most people. Their Siberia was a domestic one of bath-house, garden and samovar, of pets and peasants, of fruit-picking and amateur theatricals. The only wolf the author saw turned tail.
This improbably idyllic existence, which is evoked with notable charm, crumbled away as their remote province became caught up in the aftermath of 1917. The Stanford family were eventually to escape on the chaotic Trans-Siberian railway, packed with an odd assortment of foreign missions, soldiers and refugees. In spite of the often comic disasters that bedevilled the long journey to Vladivostok Miss Stanford has never regretted her Siberian Odyssey; nor will the reader, introduced to a fascinating way of life that is gone for ever and to a family that coped, in its British way, with Siberia and with Revolution.
Doreen Stanford was born in New Zealand in 1896. Her father’s profession as a mining engineer took him to South Africa in 1902, and her early childhood was spent there. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and left in 1914. The outbreak of the First World War postponed her journey to join her parents on a Siberian copper mine until 1916, when the story of her adventures starts. On returning to England in 1920, she worked as a secretary and in 1926 she was appointed to the staff of the Chartered Land Agents’ Society, where she served as Assistant Secretary until her retirement in 1958.
She was awarded the M.B.E. in 1949.