On the Estate: Memoirs of a Russian Lady: Drawings and Tales of Life Before the Revolution by Mariamna Davydoff Selected and Edited by Olga Davydoff Dax

Vintage, published in 1986. Very good, read condition. Dust Jacket is damaged as pictured. Hardcover with Dust Jacket.

Synopsis: Mariamna Davydoff, the Russian lady who wrote and illustrated this memoir of her life before the Revolution was born in 1871 into a large, aristocratic family whose ancestors can be traced can be traced back to the eleventh century.

After fleeing Russia in 1919, she eventually settled in Brittany with a sister and they reproduced from memory, albums of detailed text and watercolors that had been abandoned in Russia and were later destroyed by the Bolsheviks. The result is a unique, first-hand account of a way of life that we have previously known almost exclusively through the works of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, and a few other writers of the late nineteenth century.

Davydoff tells of her childhood, youth, and married life on a large country estate, and her nostalgic prose and fluidly rendered paintings evoke warm summer evenings filled with the smells of fields and forests, gay sleigh rides on frosty winter mornings, large families celebrating Christmas and Easter and engaging in various sports and pastimes of long ago. And through it all runs a sense of longing for these better, more innocent times-- a sense of paradise lost.

While a girl Mariamna Davydoff had studied painting at the Académie Julian and the Grande Chaudière in Paris, and she later made something of a reputation in Russia as caricaturist. But when she left her homeland, she had to leave most of her possessions behind, including the watercolors and drawings she had done before the Revolution.

This memoir was originally created as a legacy for her daughter, her granddaughters, and her great-grandchildren and now the selections presented here bring her charming and intimate work to a wider public.

Olga Davydoff Dax, who edited and translated the memoirs, is related to Mariamna's husband, and she came across the memoirs when she met Marianna's daughter in the United States in 1963.