Mrs. Paine. That is right.
Mr. Jenner. How fluent was—I will put it this way. How would you judge the command of Lee Oswald of the Russian language, both as to vocabulary and as to sentence construction, and grammar generally?
Mrs. Paine. He had a larger vocabulary than I do in Russian. He had less understanding of the grammar, and considerably less regard for it.
Mr. Jenner. He was not sensitive to the delicacies of the language?
Mrs. Paine. He didn't seem to care whether he was speaking it right or not, whereas I care a great deal. He did read—he certainly subscribed to the things that I have described. And my impression is that he did read them some, and that he did not shy away from reading a Russian newspaper as I do. I find newspaper reading still very hard, and magazines, also. I have to do a great deal of dictionary work to get the full meaning of a magazine or newspaper article.
Mr. Jenner. Do you think that is because you are a sensitive perfectionist as far as the language is concerned? You wish to read it and use it in its finest sense, and you avoid what I would call, for example, pigeon English use of Russian?
Mrs. Paine. I would rather communicate than avoid pigeon use, and I have to use broken Russian to communicate. In reading, I would say what I have described as my reading—it is just that I don't have a very large vocabulary—not that I want to understand every nuance of the words that I am reading. I just can't get the meaning reading it off.
Mr. Jenner. Yet you found that Lee was inclined to plunge ahead, as near as you can tell?
Mrs. Paine. I gathered so.
Mr. Jenner. Did Marina ever say anything about Lee Oswald's command of the Russian language, or his use of it?