Notes: The letter is prefixed by a cover-note to members of the RIA, as follows: The Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson St., Dublin 2. [Dated:] 25th April 1973: ‘Dear Member, / I am attaching a copy of a letter which has been received from Miss Elizabeth Coxhead. Should you have any suggestions to make, or should you know of any existing resources which are available to assist scholars such as Mme. Adreyevna, I would be very grateful to hear from you. / Yours Sincerely, Terence Brown / Acting Secretary / Committee for the Study of Anglo-Irish Language and Literature. A copy of the following letter is held in the papers of Sybil Le Brocquy. |
2 St. Mary’s Way
Gerrards Crossy Buckinghamshire
5L9 9BL
To: Alan Bliss, Esq.
Royal Irish Academy
19 Dawson Street
Dublin, 2.
April 13th 1973
Dear Mr. Bliss,
You are good enough to send me regularly your handlist of Anglo-Irish studies, so I thought you might be interested to hear of a passionately enthusiastic student of Anglo-Irish literature whom my brother and his wife met on a recent trip to the Soviet Union. She is Mme. Sofia Adreyevnap 101000 Moscow, Bolsheviski per., 7 kv. 41. She is a lecturer in English at Moscow University, whom they met on the boat going over, (she has a daughter married in Denmark, and is therefore allowed to pay her occasional visits), and it turned out that her particular subject is Yeats and the Irish Renascence. She is pathetically starved of books - one copy of Yeats’s poems has to circulate among all her students, and so on. As it happened, Geoffrey had taken with him a copy of my “Lady Gregory”, and this was given to Sofia as a return for her kindness in showing them round Moscow, She wrote me a letter which was not only deeply grateful, but really well-informed and appreciative, and asked if she might “borrow” my other Irish book, “Daughters of Erin”. I was down to my two last copies, but needless to say, I had great pleasure in making her a present of one of them.
But it does seem ironic, that here is somebody apparently perfectly free to receive books (provided that they are reasonably “classic” and contain no material which the authorities might consider subversive) but who is unable to get them because her appalling and wooden-headed government forbid her to send money out of the country.
It struck me to wonder whether it might not be possible for your Committee to supply her with gifts of further books about the Irish Renascence? They would have to be gifts because she can’t pay for them, but in return she would I’m sure be only too happy to send you anything about the I.R. that is published in Russian. And in any case, the fact that she is so anxious to have them “does honour to Ireland”, as Lady Gregory would say, and emphasises the fact that you were the first revolutionary country in Europe and that others have been following your example ever since!
Anyway, if you feel that there is anything in my suggestion perhaps you will communicate with her direct?
Yours sincerely,
Elizabeth Coxhead.
|