A chara, – The point about how Vladimir Ilyich Lenin spoke English has been raised again (An Irishman’s Diary by Frank McNally, February 11th). This spurs me to put my recollections in this matter on the record.
Some time in the mid- to late- 1970s, I was at a meeting organised by the Ireland-USSR Society at which Roddy Connolly (the son of James) spoke about his visit to the infant Soviet Union in the early 1920s. This was preceded by a short silent film in which Roddy was shown walking across the square in front of the Winter Palace in what was then Petrograd and conversing with Lenin. One of the first things that struck me was that Roddy was a gangling young man alongside a person of relatively small stature and that he had to lean over somewhat to speak to him. The second was that there was no interpreter, so they were obviously speaking in a mutually comprehensible language.
After the film, Roddy gave his talk in the course of which he stated that he and Lenin were in fact exchanging views in English and that Vladimir Ilyich spoke that tongue "with a Rathmines accent". Roddy also said that, after Lenin's death, the Russians, on researching his life, believed that when he was in London and had placed an advertisement in the London Timesto the effect of "if you help teach me English, I'll help teach you Russian", the person who replied being a "Mac" somebody or other was thus a Scot. But Roddy said that, on the contrary, it must have been an Irishman.
I have heard recordings of Lenin speechifying in Russian and wondered if there was a recording somewhere of him expressing himself in English, but have not found one.
I had the honour of meeting Roddy on a couple of occasions. Indeed, once he chaired a meeting at which I spoke about his father’s politics. It is one of the regrets of my life that I never got around to asking him more about his conversation with Vladimir Ilyich. – Is mise,
DALTÚN Ó CEALLAIGH,
York Road,
Rathmines,
Dublin 6.