Item 91 - Letter from Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy to R. C. Trevelyan

1 item

Boulogne s/ Seine. - Does not know whether he can come to Italy yet as his quarterly allowance from Hyderabad is late - '[p]eople in the Nation States are so slack and unmindful' - and he has debts to pay off; in addition, Professor Kalitinsky is trying to defer a recall to Prague so that he can look after the dog. If Trevelyan has to leave at the beginning of February, as he wrote from Berlin, Suhrawardy had better wait for him in Paris. Julian has been for lunch and met Kalitinsky, his son Andrei, and Reksusha [the dog]; Suhrawardy then saw him again with two Cambridge friends in a café in town. Has had great news from Madame Germanova whose performance at her theatre as Masha, in [Chekhov's] "Three Sisters" in English, went very well. Was looking forward to hearing the new version of [Trevelyan's] Sulla. Trevelyan is the kindest of his friends; very much hopes to get to Italy to see him. A postscript on a separate sheet describes a meeting with a friend of Cheng Sheng, Lung Wo; he looks very young but is apparently an admiral of the Chinese fleet and is travelling with his wife and children on behalf of the Nankin government. He is anxious to meet people sympathetic to the Chinese nationalists, and Suhrawardy wonders if Trevelyan could see him and introduce him to meet Waley and Lowes Dickinson, or perhaps a Labour Party member who likes China. He talks English better than Cheng Sheng, though he has a very soft voice; seems a nice, kind man, though who knows what he might have done during the revolution.

Pencil annotation dating the letter to 1930.