Diplomat's wife is professor

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33190, 2 April 1973, Page 7

Diplomat's wife is professor

(By

JUDY OWEN,

Reuter correspondent)

After a “go-go’’ life as professor of callisthenics at Moscow University, surpervising a home for her husband and two teen-age children, Mrs Ksana Benyukh has gone to the other extreme of having too little to do now that she lives in Wellington.

But that is not to say the wife of the First Secretary of the Information Section at the Soviet Legation (Mr O. P. Benyukh), sits at home killing time.

Mrs Benyukh, who is one of the leading teachers of callisthenics in the Soviet Union and a doctor of sports physiology, helps at a Wellington gymnastics club on Saturdays. And she studies English at the Wellington Polytechnic Institute for three periods a day, four days a week. Before her husband was posted to New Zealand she was teaching herself English, and not finding it easy. “In our country women like to work, and it is difficult to live without work for me, so that teaching gymnasium is a big help,” she said, on a re--cent visit to Christchurch. “But it can be lonely without our children, who are at school in the Soviet Union, and without a job.”

The gymnastics she teaches Wellington girls was “nof quite callisthenics,” she said, settling in a chair with the ease and grace of a ballerina.

“MODERN-ART GYMNASTICS” “Callisthenics is modernart gymnastics. It is . . . how would you say it? . . . neardancing exercises to music, done with ribbons, bottleshaped batons, skipping ropes, balls, and hoops,” she said. Sports gymnastics, favoured in New Zealand, included work on bars, beams and over vaults, she added. “I am astonished that there is so little known about callisthenics throughout New Zealand when there is a good callisthenics team in Auckland, coached by Mrs A. Bellwood, who originally came from Estonia,” she said. Mrs Benyukh also grew up in Estonia. There she graduated from the Tartu University, the oldest university in the Soviet Union, was the Champion diver of the Estonian Republic, and one of the leading gymnasts of the Soviet Union before she took up her appointment as professor of callisthenics at the Moscow University.

Callisthenics is widely practised in the Soviet Union. Since the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre began to include contemporary and modern expressive dancing in its repertoire, for instance, callisthenics has become a required subject for the dancers. “It helps the dancers become more graceful and better co-ordinated; it helps them to find new forms of movement,” she said. Far from being a mannishlooking athlete, Ksana Benyukh is a tiny blue-eyed blonde with a warmly feminine charm. She does not use her title of professor in New Zealand, though she intends to return to her post at the Moscow University when her husband goes back to the Soviet Union. “Here in New. Zealand 1 am my husband’s wife; I am Mrs Benyukh,” she said with a pixie-like smile.