BEFORE IGOR

In 1945 Igor Gouzenko, author of the best selling The Fall of a Titan, made, with his family, a dramatic, escape from the Ottawa Soviet embassy. Now, his wife, with whom he lives in seclusion, under protection of the Canadian government, gives an absorbing account of her youth in Russia. Daughter of an engineer, who was, at least outwardly, apolitical, she was able to escape many of the hardships endured by her co-patriots. But the brutalization and terror which she witnessed in Siberia, the Crimea, and European Russia, formed early in her the seeds of her adult rebellion. Mrs. Gouzenko describes with equal facility a droll encounter with a tarantula, an amusing episode with a mad Caucassian suitor, and a violent incident of Russian discipline. Written simply, and with a constant appeal to the senses, Before Igor will win a variety of readers, both for its touching human portrait and for the clear picture it draws of life in a system predicated on dehumanization.