Russia in Retrospect

THE COUNTESS FROM IOWA--Countess Nostitz--Putnam ($3).

To most readers, the value of contemporary reminiscences lies as much in what can be made out dimly between the lines as in what is boldly stated in the text. Last year the reminiscences of Mabel Dodge Luhan (European Experiences) and Elizabeth Drexel Lehr ("King Lehr" and the Gilded Age) were prime examples of such oblique candor. Although both authors revealed an intermittent circumspection, both were sufficiently engrossed in telling their own stories to make indirect admissions of which they appeared to be unaware. Cut in the same pattern as those books, The Countess from Iowa is nevertheless much less interesting, much more guarded, offers little spur to the imagination.

Born in Hamburg, Iowa, at some undisclosed date before 1900, Lilie Bouton traveled to Reno and then to San Francisco, attended the Van Ness Seminary on Nob Hill, soon broke away from her parents' domination and got a part in a San Francisco theatrical troupe. She traveled East with the company, left it because of the manager's unwelcome attentions, was stranded in New York until she got a part in a road show. She was becoming well-known as an actress, had been engaged to Arthur Byron, refused the proposals of several eminent theatrical figures, when she married Baron Guido von Nimptsch, sad-faced, 44-year-old German aristocrat who had lost his personal fortune and was engaged in the champagne business in Manhattan. With him she returned to Germany, was presented to the Kaiser, learned that her husband was heavily in debt, was soon neglected by him. At a ball for the young Hohenzollern princes she met Count Nostitz, military attache of the Russian Embassy, divorced the Baron to marry the Count in 1907.

The life she lived in pre-Revolutionary Russia and pre-War Paris has become familiar to readers of the memoirs of onetime Russian aristocrats. Countess Nostitz was accused of being a spy during the War, witnessed the disintegration of the old order under the sequence of defeats, was almost more hostile to the opposition party within the ranks of the nobility than to the revolutionists.

The Nostitzes escaped to Finland, were trapped again in the Ukraine, eventually got out by way of Constantinople. In Paris and New York Countess Nostitz ardently propagandized against the Bolsheviks, flinging "her entire energies into it, even at the risk of being unpopular." Despite her zeal, the only success she could record was that of persuading the late Senator Medill McCormick, who had "leanings towards 'giving the Bolsheviks a chance,' " not to visit Russia.

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