Russian Opera Singer’s Unusual Experience in Volunteer Army

Southland Times, Issue 23793, 15 April 1939, Page 16

Russian Opera Singer’s Unusual Experience in Volunteer Army

Madame lul gardo, who recently arrived in Sydney, has had an astonishing career. After an unhappy childhood and her debut as an opera singer, she joined General Kornilov’s Volunteer Army. During the war in Russia she was wounded five times, and received five decorations for service and bravery.

Madame Gardo was bom in South Russia, of a gipsy mother and an aristocrat father, says The Sydney Morning Herald.

She describes herself as “a child of hate,” for her mother wanted no children and her father only a boy. She played only with two small boy cousins and grew into a real tomboy, shooting sparrows, riding headlong across the plains, and getting into all the mischief that small boys delight in. She was a long, lanky little girl, and her mother disliked her more as she grew older. “Had she shown me any love at all I would have worshipped her,” said Madame Gardo, “for she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. But she called me ‘the ugly toad.’ ” Several times the small girl ran away from home, and when she was 11 she refused to stay at home with her parents any more, and lived by herself with her servants, in her own house. Her father, of whom she was very fond she saw occasionally; her mother never at all. But for all her loneliness she was happier away from her mother’s unnatural jealousy. One day when she was playing by herself in the garden she sat on her

swing and sang some of her favourite Russian folk-songs to herself. But she was overheard by Madame Nina Antonovna Lenskaya, the famous prima donna of the Grand Imperial Opera, St. Petersburg. She was ’ charmed with the girl’s voice, and took her to live with her. This was one of the happiest periods of Madame’s life. For two years she studied under Madame Nina, loving every minute of it—revelling in the music, in the “mothering” the older woman gave her, in the hitherto untasted excitement and pleasure of parties and receptions.

- She made her debut when she was 14—and a very short time after married a professor nearly 30 years her senior. They lived extravagantly—on her money —and from the first the marriage was doomed to failure, and the singer returned to Madame Nina shortly after her baby girl Eugenia was bom. “In 1917,” said Madame Gardo, her

big brown eyes lighting up at the memory, "I joined the Volunteer Army, under General Kornilov, whom I had long worshipped as a hero. Out of an army of 4000 six of us were women —all aristocrats—and until my dying day I will be proud to have served with that army. “We all shaved our hair and wore the same clothes as the men, and of course performed all the same duties as the men. But I was the only one who poined under my own woman’s name. The others all took men’s names.”

Her adventures in the war were wild and hair-raising, and her life constantly fraught with danger. She was wounded five times; friends died in her arms; she took part in night retreats; she witnessed the massacre on the banks of the Kuban; she was cut off from her Cossack troops and wandered into enemy ranks; she found courage and kindness in unexpected places—and she witnessed blood-curdling atrocities.

One of her wounds was in a leg, and she lifted up her white skirt to show where a calf had been cut away. Sh,e speaks graphically of the incident. “I had not been in the saddle 15 minutes before a field-gun shell burst right under my horse’s feet, practically blowing him to pieces. How I escaped death I do not know. I was hurled backwards, turning several somersaults in the air before I crashed to the ground. “There I lay till nightfall, when the firing ceased a little. In the white radiance of the moon I could see that the fields were strewn with corpses, and I lay alone, stunned and unable to move in this cemetery of unburied men.” BABY PRISONER During the night some of the night marauders crawled over the battlefield, killing and robbing the wounded, and very often torturing them as well. One of them drove his dagger into her left leg. But Madame Gardo had been expecting an attack, and clinched her teeth and uttered no sound, knowing only too well what treatment she could expect if he discovered she were alive. But the man was satisfied she was d.ad and crawled away to his next victim. But her greatest tragedy of the war was the death of her little daughter. She was captured by the Reds and died of starvation in a bolshevik prison. Since those troublous days Madame Gardo has travelled in nearly every country of the world, collecting folksongs and folk-music, learning the proverbs, the religion, the food, the customs, of each. She now has a priceless collection of music and costumes from 26 different countries—and in her will she has left them to the Melbourne Museum. e Her collection of songs include those of Mexico, aboriginal Australian, Red Indian, Astec, Eskimo, Turkish, Maori, Cingalese, Ukrainian, Polish, Gipsy, and Gaelic. ■;

Madame, who has already told of her early life and wartime experiences in her “Cossack Fury,” is already at work on another book, this time dealing with folk-songs of different countries. She is also working on a second book of adventure which she will title “Since Then.”

She has had some interesting experiences in the collecting of her songs and music, for in each place she has lived for at least six months, absorbing the atmosphere of each _ peasant community, for this she feels is essential for the right interpretation of the songs. She learned Gaelic in the western isles of Scotland, living there for six months in a fisherman’s thatched cottage. ■ In New Guinea she saw a native lying along the trunk of a tree playing a strange instrument and singing softly to himself. She was afraid that he would stop if he caught sight of heri so she crept up behind him and lay in the sun listening to him. “I was almost afraid to breathe,” said Madame, “but I got the songs,” and she smiled her quick smile of pleasure. Maltese legends and songs she learnt while staying in Malta *with the late Admiral Jack Fisher and Lady Fisher.