“The thirteen stories of Billancourt Tales are closely observed, potently phrased and dapperly shaped . . . . Marian Schwartz’s English translation defly captures the fanciful twists and turns of Berberova’s imagination . . . . Indispensable.” —New York Times Book Review

“We have these stories, and for the lives they commemorate and the particular time and place they so keenly preserve, we cherish them.” —Los Angeles Times

“Berberova is, quite simply, an imaginative writer of the highest distinction.” —(The London) Independent

Last year Sovietologists and a few nonfiction book critics celebrated the publication of Lesley Chamberlain’s Lenin’s Private War: the Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. Thanks to Chamberlain’s thorough research and translation of recently-released Soviet documents, Lenin’s exile of two boatloads of Russian intellectuals in 1922, an event which had been a mere footnote in the history books, now has a full chapter of its own. Lenin personally drew up the list of intellectuals he wanted exiled and at one point berated Stalin, whom he had put in charge of the operation, for not taking swift enough action on his directive. Among the Russian exiles who left during this purge were the poet Vladislav Khodasevich and his wife, Nina Berberova.

Nina Berberova with Vladislav Khodasevich

Upon reading this, I hurried to my bookshelves. Yes, there were all my Berberovas: The Tattered Cloak, The Accompanist, Billancourt Tales, The Book of Happiness, Three Ladies from St. Petersburg, Cape of Storms, the biography Moura, and, her autobiography, The Italics are Mine. During most of Berberova’s life, these works were available only in Russian or French. We are indebted to translator Marian Schwartz, with a little help from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, for rescuing this exiled Russian author from the footnotes of Russian literary history.

Berberova composed her fiction, poetry, and autobiography in Russian. During the twenty-five years she lived in France, where she had settled after her exile, her works were slowly translated into French and eventually enjoyed enough popularity that one of her early books, The Accompanist, was turned into a movie. In 1950, having endured the Nazi occupation of France, she emigrated to the United States and taught Russian at Yale, then Princeton, and retired in 1971. Though Harcourt Brace published Berberova’s autobiography The Italics are Mine in 1969 (translated by Philippe Radley), her works of fiction did not appear in English until the late 1980s. According to Schwarz in the introduction to Moura, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis discovered French volumes of Berberova’s fiction in the 1980’s published by Actes Sud, brought them to the attention of Knopf, and so brought The Tattered Cloak to readers of English for the first time. Just before Berberova’s death, glasnost arrived and brought her the great joy of seeing her works finally find their way home to a Russian audience, an event she hadn’t thought possible in her lifetime.

Berberova has the kind of dramatic back story that today’s publicists love to have attached to their authors: a writer who suffered years of obscurity but was redeemed late in life. Irène Némirovsky, author of Suite Française and, shares a similar, yet more tragic history that ended with her death at the hands of the Nazis and her works discovered years later in suitcases. While also Russian and writing in France during the same era as Berberova, Némirovsky had emigrated to France with her family when she was only fifteen, and she composed her works in French directly for a French audience. Berberova’s works were confined to Russian émigré publications until after the war. To date, there is no evidence that the two writers knew each other. Némirovsky mined the chaos of the German occupation of France for her moving stories. Berberova bought a black notebook at the start of the war but found she could only record brief facts and thoughts about the events of that time. Excerpts from this notebook can be found in her autobiography, The Italics are Mine. One cannot help but feel the pain with which she unearths these memories when she introduces this section by writing,

My black notebook now begins, and still smells of earth: at one time it was buried in our basement and bloomed with dark-green spots of mold.

The only time Berberova’s fiction addresses the war is in opening story in The Tattered Cloak, “The Resurrection of Mozart.” There are scenes eerily similar to Némirovsky’s in Suite Française: roads clogged with French refugees, villages overflowing with strangers, everyone on the run, but not knowing where to go to escape the Germans. But ultimately Berberova’s opening scene in has more in common with the dinner party that opens Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Russian émigrés are gathered in a country home thirty miles from Paris while the French army retreats from Sedan. The conversation turns to what the dead would say about the disturbing turn of world events if they could be resurrected:

“Yes, it was exactly a year ago today that Nevelsky dies. He knew a lot of this was coming. He predicted so much of it.”

“Well, he couldn’t have picked a better time to die. At least he doesn’t have to see what we see. If he were resurrected he’d either spit in disgust or break down and cry.”

Facing the hostess, at the opposite end of the table, sat a Frenchman brought along by Chabarov but whom no one else really knew. Simply, and without any fussy apology, he asked them to translate what they were all saying.

“Monsieur Daunou, we were talking about the dead, and what they would say if they were resurrected and saw what’s going on now,” replied Maria Leonidovna Sushkova.

Daunou took his black pipe out of his mouth, furrowed his brow, and smiled.

“Is it worth waking the dead?” he said, looking his hostess straight in the eye. “I suppose I might well invite Napoleon to come and have a look at our times, but I’d certainly spare my parents the pleasure.”

Russians, in the face of catastrophe, politely discussing death and resurrection – Tolstoy would be proud. The next morning, Maria Leonidovna Sushkova’s husband and her friends go off to work in Paris only to become trapped there as Germans begin bombing. Home alone, Maria becomes disconcerted when a refugee turns up on her doorstep. She lets him sleep in a shed while she worries over her husband’s fate. Finally, her husband and friends return from Paris after an arduous journey. They decide to flee deeper into the countryside and Maria tells the refugee he must leave. He disappears before she has a chance to say goodbye and their plight, the very fate of France, seems sealed in sadness:

“He’s leaving, he’s leaving,” she said very quietly but distinctly, the way people sometimes utter a meaningless word, and burst into tears. And without understanding what was wrong, or why she had suddenly been overcome by such weakness, she closed the gate gently and went into the house.

This story ends with the suicide of the Frenchman who had earlier said he’d spare his parents the pleasure of being resurrected during these difficult times. The Russians, in a script taken from Berberova’s own life, flee rather than succumb to death.

Berberova’s novel The Accompanist, written in 1936, begins with an awkward eighteenth century narrative device used by Daniel Defoe in Moll Flanders: Berberova paints a thin disguise of a memoir onto her novel. Thankfully, once the opening page announcing this artifice is turned, we are immersed in a story whose lineage can be traced to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The Accompanist’s Raskolnikov is Sonechka, a young poverty-stricken pianist who finds work in St. Petersburg with a glamorous soprano. Sonechka is alternately enraptured and repulsed by her employer, Maria Nikolaevna. Soon she plots her course:

I have to earn it [Maria’s trust], deserve it, so that later, when the time comes, out of the blue, I can shield her from some misfortune, rescue her suddenly, serve her so slavishly that she doesn’t even know it’s me. I have to make myself indispensable, irreplaceable, utterly faithful, without a thought for myself … Or else some day betray her, all her beauty and her voice, just to prove that there are things more powerful than she, that there are things that can make her cry, that there is a limit to her invincibility.

Sonechka escapes Bolshevik Russia with Maria and her husband and moves to Paris, where Maria finally pursues her vocal artistry to great acclaim. Though Sonechka’s belly is no longer empty and her clothes are finer, she continues to watch for her chance to bring down Maria. The appearance of a mysterious man from Maria’s past offers Sonechka an opportunity. Ultimately, the ending twists and surprises and Sonechka’s poisoned arrow hits an unintended mark. She finds herself “punished” by a return to a life of strained circumstances. More than many of Berberova’s works, The Accompanist is steeped in the gloom of St. Petersburg in the early days of the Bolsheviks. Sonechka carries this gloom within her, like a worm mixed with resentment and guilt, within her and even the bright lights of Paris are incapable of extinguishing the St. Petersburg darkness from her soul.

Just as The Accompanist is anchored by its St. Petersburg setting, Billancourt Tales is defined by its location in the Billancourt suburb of Paris. Here is where Russian émigrés, forced to flee because of the Revolution, are gamely trying to make their way in whatever job they can find to keep poverty at bay. The thirteen stories in this collection were written between 1928 and 1940 and published in the Russian émigré newspaper, The Latest News. The Russian exiles in these stories, if not for the Bolsheviks, would have happily lived out their lives on Russian soil. Instead, they find themselves celebrating Bastille Day, auditioning for movie roles, pawning their meager possessions for food, and forced to face ghosts from their Revolutionary pasts. This collection suffers from an immature narrator who is a constant witness and too often a participant in these stories. The best moments are when the narrator melts into the background and we’re left to suffer alone with the Russians of Billancourt. “The Little Stranger,” is one of the finest stories in this collection. Anastasia Georgievna, who had “been a cheerful, flirtatious young thing” under the tsar’s regime, has come to live alone in the Hotel Caprice in Billancourt:

She [Anastasia] walked up to one of the women who was rocking an infant, shifting him from arm to arm. She had just nursed him, and her breast was bared. The infant had been born about a week before and had probably still not been registered at the Billancourt City Hall. Anastasia heard the woman croon:
     Tri-ta-taski tri-ta-tish
     First on that one, then on this.
Anastasia Georgievna looked at the breast that had been dragged all across Europe and felt something warm fill her eyes and even spill over her eyelids and run down her cheek, something people might notice. She went to the bistro owners, took out a little of the money she kept in her traveling bag, and asked them to put a piece of meat in each cup of bouillon.

Nine years pass and Anastasia falls upon difficult times. Then she receives a letter saying that her sister has died and her thirteen-year old daughter was left in Anastasia’s care:

Anastasia Georgievna turned white, then gray, and barely reached her chair. At first she was pierced by a kind of joy, but then a horrible unease engulfed her: Not for this had she inured herself to her ferocious loneliness all these years, not for this had she reconciled herself to the idea of dying with unclosed eyes, not so that now, suddenly, everything would be violated and her memories of her life as a young thing and her habits as a dying woman would go up in smoke.

Comfort comes from unexpected sources and, so it is for Anastasia. When she falls ill shortly after her niece’s arrival, her niece proves a practical companion. Though this story feels in danger of veering into Dickensian sentimentality, we are in Russian hands. There is no windfall of riches that the dead bestow on the living. Instead, there are a few coins to cover the eyes of a corpse and pay the burial fees. The last words of the narrator proclaim Anastasia’s life as lucky and leave readers with the rusty taste of irony in their mouths.

It is the trilogy of Cape of Storms, The Book of Happiness, and The Ladies from St. Petersburg, all written between 1948 and 1952 that show Berberova at the fullest command of her art. Russians are once again her protagonists and Paris is the primary setting. However, in these novels the émigré experience recedes and an exploration of feminist and humanist themes takes the podium.

Cape of Storms is a coming-of-age story of three young Russian women in the émigré community of early-twentieth century Paris. They are half-sisters who share the same father and live with him and his current wife in near-poverty. As a child, the oldest sister Dasha witnesses the brutal death of her mother at the hands of the Bolsheviks, is saved by a neighbor and whisked away to Paris by her father. The youngest, Zai, loses her actress mother to illness and lives with the same neighbor who saved Dasha until the age of fourteen when she is sent to Paris to begin a new life with her father’s family. The novel’s chapters alternate between Dasha’s and Zai’s points of view and Sonia’s (the middle child’s) journal entries.

Berberova’s great feat is in taking three characters of the same sex who are similar in age and background and making their voices unique without resorting to clichéd devices such as verbal tics. She again channels Tolstoy by differentiating them by their distinct moral compasses. Dasha, after engaging in a brief bout of mysticism, devotes herself to a printing house profession and keeps her emotions at bay to the point that she barely recognizes a proposal of marriage from her French employer when it falls into her lap. Disappointingly for her and the reader, she accepts the proposal and is whisked away to a life of luxury on a hilltop in South Africa. Banished from her family, the stepmother of two high-spirited boys, Dasha is seemingly left for dead:

It was as if all the furniture in her soul had been rearranged: everything had changed. In Paris she had had a habitable, well-worn, not always comfortable, not always well-swept room, an old bookshelf over the sofa, a window looking out on another building. Now everything was different. Out her window were eucalyptus and orange tress, books lay on a pedestal table, though she didn’t know how they’d gotten there, the carpet was rolled up to reveal a beautiful waxed parquet floor that you could slide on. The day was meted out so that there was not time for self-contemplation. And at night sleep was sweet in her low, fresh bed.

Repeatedly in her fiction, Berberova either kills off mothers or describes them as creatures devoid of life. Clearly, jobs and motherhood are incompatible.

Zai has the romantic heart of Tolstoy’s Natasha and, like Natasha, stumbles in a romantic fog; first she dabble in poetry, then casts this off to become an actress, then, after a failed adventure with love, she lands a job with a bookseller. Unlike Dasha, Zai’s choice leaves her feeling frightened, but not dead:

She [Zai] started thinking about her new job; she wasn’t sleepy and she didn’t put out the light. … Lord, help me make everything all right, so I don’t get fired, so Papa and Auntie Liuba live, so that I’m not left on the sidewalk like that dog, so that Dasha is happy and we get to see each other.

Like the dog on the sidewalk. She shuddered and opened her eyes. The empty bed by the opposite wall. She trembled under her blanket. What was she afraid of now?

Is it the books or the job that saves her? No matter, both are preferable lines to motherhood.

Sonia, the third daughter, stubbornly pursues a cloistered academic life and eventually falls victim to bitterness and hopelessness. As in “The Resurrection of Mozart,” Berberova uses suicide to make a bitter statement:

Having lost my [Sonia’s] faith in everything once and for all, I’m like a simple peasant woman. I await a miracle. Miracles sometimes occur, of course, but on in an intact world. What kind of miracle can one expect in our, where everything is backwards: people are silent when they could speak out and speak when they should be silent; the sole act that can lead them to harmony is considered suicide. By leaving the world, I will merge with it.

As I read this passage, I felt as if I’d slipped into Berberova's black notebook. In Sonia she’d found a character into which she funneled all life’s sorrow, disappointments, and horrible contradictions.

In Cape of Storms the provinciality that can be felt in Berberova’s earlier work is cast off. Its women struggle for footholds in the modern world. Will their lives be guided by their intellect and vocations, by ties of marriage and family, or fall victim to larger forces? The questions Berberova raises in Cape of Storms remain as relevant to 21st century women, no matter what passport they carry, as they were sixty years ago.

The second volume of the trilogy, The Book of Happiness, opens with a rather broad wink: one should beware the word happiness in a novel’s title, especially if the author is Russian; irony is most surely afoot:

Sam lay on his back, his eyes closed, right at the edge of the broad, low bed. The slightest movement and it seemed he might slip off like a sack onto the goatskin rug that was spread out over a red carpet. Jerked back by the recoil, clutching a revolver, Sam’s stilled hand reached toward the shaggy gray fur. His face, staring up at the ceiling, was calm, and only his black punctured temple (which had stopped bleeding a long time ago) lent something extraordinarily sad to the wave of ginger hair and paleness of the freckled forehead.

Yet another suicide, this time as a point of departure. The deceased, Sam, is the childhood companion of Vera, the novel’s protagonist. Vera’s been called away from her husband’s sickbed to Sam’s Paris hotel room by the hotel manager who found her phone number on Sam’s bedside table. Sam’s death invites Vera to revisit her memories of their shared childhood in Russia before the Bolshevik sent his family packing. When her husband finally dies and her time of caregiver bondage ends, in a moment that will hold emotional resonance for many readers, she feels guilt over her newfound freedom. Slowly, she moves away from the two deaths that defined her and into a life she defines for herself. But wait! Her waltz with freedom is too brief! A man declares his love for her; she tries to run only to be nearly killed by the bullet of his jealous ex-wife. The miracle of the missed bullet propels her to link her fate with this man, but then Berberova’s irony returns; just as they are traveling on a train towards their metaphorical future, Vera discovers she is pregnant. “But she didn’t say anything because when she stood that close to him she lost her voice.” The Book of Happiness begins with one kind of death, and ends with another. Today’s crop of Literary Mama-type magazines would feast on Berberova’s take on motherhood.

The Ladies from St. Petersburg is a collection of three novellas each set in the early twentieth century and beginning with an arrival. Berberova’s shines her spotlight on death from natural, rather than unnatural, causes. A mother, not surprisingly, is killed off by a heart attack in the title story. Unlike in “The Little Stranger,” where death was handled as a commonplace event, this death is a major inconvenience for everyone except the daughter, who stands shocked at the story’s center. Against the backdrop of chaos caused by local Bolshevik battles, death is shown in all its ugly details:

The air was stagnant. Blue-gray incense smoke hung at eye level; there was nothing to breath. The sun was getting higher and higher in the sky ….Birds had hidden from the heat, but big blue flies in a thick buzz kept flying right up to the deceased woman’s face.

“Please don’t let them land. Please don’t let them land!” kept going through Verochka’s mind, and suddenly she saw, from the very middle of the coffin, a stream of liquid falling between the two stools and onto the painted lid of the balcony.

“Sins of commission and omission!” proclaimed the priest.

The stream ran toward a crack, spread, and puddle; the priest noticed it close to his worsted twill shoe. He said something to the junior deacon, who leaned toward Byrdin.

“We could use a basin”

A minute later the cook put a large, chipped basin under the invisible crack. The drops ran out abruptly and distinctly.

In “Zoya,” a young woman flees from revolutionary violence in Kharkov only to arrive in a less-than-welcoming boarding house filled with hostile, suspicious women. She then falls deathly ill and inconveniences the strangers who took her in. The hostile women convince a college student to take Zoya to the hospital. But it’s too late for Zoya to be saved by a man; she has fallen victim to the duel killers of disease and revolution:

He sat her [Zoya] in the high cab and put his arm around her again. She sensed an amorphous calm from this final tenderness. How quiet it had become all around, how tranquil. Suddenly, though, she was thrown forward. The wind (oh, what a wind!) lashed her face, chasing her with a howl and a roar. It’s going to tear her in two, it’s going to carry her away! Oh, hold her! Hold onto her, Mr. Student! Be a good man!

And finally, in “The Big City,” the death of a Russian’s wife propels him to immigrate to New York City in 1952. He has little money and few prospects; the death of his wife has propelled him to immigrate. After he returns to his apartment from a quest to find turpentine to remove a paint spot on his trousers, he has a new perspective on his new home:

Now I can say something about that observation I made when I went out that afternoon for paint. I realized then that every person brings whatever he can to this big city. One brings the shadow of Elsinor’s prince, another the long shadow of the Spanish knight, a third the profile of the immortal Dublin seminarian, a fourth some dream, or thought, or melody, the noonday heat of some treasure, the memory of a snow-drifted grave, the divine grandeur of a mathematical formula, or the strum of guitar strings. All this has dissolved on this cape and formed the life I plan to take part in too from now on. With you, who are not here with me but alive in this air I breathe.

I can’t help but forgive Berberova this rhapsodic ending, this epiphany extraordinaire. After facing down all that death, a moment of hope at the end of the day is such a relief.

Lenin’s banishment of Russian intellectuals, and the subsequent flight and silencing of countless others, left a hole in the cultural fabric of an entire generation of Russians. While Nabokov, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn and many others spoke out from their banished points beyond the Iron Curtain, Berberova is one of the rare Russian women who used fiction to chronicle her experience of displacement. The Russian Revolution, the funeral of Russian Poet Alexander Blok, Berlin after World War I, the Nazi occupation of France, even America during the reign of Nixon and the Vietnam War are only some of the historical bookmarks that informed her writing. Her stories, filled with the displaced, the poverty-stricken, the hopeless and the hopeful, are stories that reach out from the twentieth century and speak with wisdom to this century. As we currently watch other embattled countries fall victim to a similar cultural loss as that of the Russians, perhaps we should read such stories as Berberova’s, not only to fill in slices of forgotten history, or to become wiser in the ways of human experience, but to honor those stories from endangered nations which may be lost to us forever. - Open Letters: A Monthly Arts and Literature Review

The story of Nina Berberova’s career has all the earmarks of a literary fable that might have been written by Henry James or her compatriot Vladimir Nabokov or even by Berberova herself, although it never was. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1901, Berberova spent all of her writing life in exile, separated from her family, her point of origin and her principal audience. She began to write fiction in the early 1920s after she emigrated to Paris and gave up writing it in the early 1950s, when she moved to the United States.

In the course of her long life, she was impoverished, productive, fleetingly popular among a certain limited readership, neglected, forgotten and, before she died in 1993, rediscovered, first in Paris, then (after glasnost) in Russia and finally – and still – in America. The moral of the fable: Good writing should – will, when the stars are in correct alignment – assume its rightful portion of inches on the world’s bookshelf even if it takes many decades to do so.

In such novels and novellas as “The Ladies of St. Petersburg,” “The Tattered Cloak” and “A Book of Happiness,” the reader finds Berberova’s astute fictional eye turned on Russian men and women whose lives are shaken up by the events of the revolution. Her narratives tend to sweep widely across time and place. Her characters experience themselves in a familiar Russo-literary tradition of introspection and impassioned self-regard. They are often restless, soulful, troubled and groping; they seek, but seldom find, happiness or perfect love; they strive for but rarely achieve great professional success. They are empathically drawn, incisively mulled over and occasionally rather summarily cast into the hands of fate.

The mystery at the heart of the Berberova fable is this: Why, when she so clearly had a knack for stories, did she give up writing them when she came to the United States in the early ’50s?

The answer may lie in the issue of displacement that Berberova takes up so sympathetically in “Billancourt Tales,” a collection of 13 stories that, by any logical chronology, should have been her first book. These stories are a sampling of the dozens that Berberova wrote between 1928 and 1940 for the Latest News, one of several emigre newspapers that then appeared in France and served the substantial population of exiled Russians.

They are the rough equivalent, in Berberova’s career, of Anton Chekhov’s early comedic newspaper sketches, but to identify them as the work of apprenticeship is in no way to call them uninteresting. In “Billancourt Tales” the reader watches as Berberova’s fictional intelligence begins to take shape and acquire color. She finds her voice (in this case unified by the generally omniscient male narrator Grisha), her subject matter (the working-class, largely male Russian emigre community of Billancourt, whose central employer, the Renault factory, hired them to replace the French workers destroyed by World War I) and her themes, which perhaps inevitably center on the tensions and longings of lives led in exile.

In her autobiography Berberova described these Billancourt pieces as a “lyrico-ironical series of stories about Billancourt-Russian indigents, drunks, patresfamilias, Renault workers, courtyard singers, [and] declasse eccentrics” and reported how, as they appeared, shopkeepers would slip jars of preserves into her bag and shoemakers would resole her shoes gratis and the local hairdresser refused her tip, explaining, “We read your stories, we are very grateful to you, you do not scorn our way of life.”

Gratitude for a lack of scorn: There is something very moving in the phenomenon of a writer finding a community of displaced people, drawing their portraits and giving them a voice – in effect ensuring them a place in the most powerful container of memory there is, which is to say, literature.

And so here they are: men and women saddened – but, pointedly, not possessed – by their lost Russia, scrambling to build new Russo-French lives in French suburbia, questing for success, comfort, pleasure and love, and naturally finding little of each. There is Ivan Ivanovich Kondurin, a ballroom pianist in the time of the czar who (in “An Incident With Music”) gives up his work as a bookkeeper to play in a silent movie theater but is suddenly jobless when the talkies come along and he is “caught by history once again.” There is Anastasia Georgievna Seyantseva, a mysterious longtime habitue of Billancourt who (in “The Little Stranger”) receives an unexpected legacy: custody of her niece. And there is Grisha’s uncle, the loveless Ivan Pavlovich, a Renault worker who (in “The Argentine”) seeks company for his “empty, orphaned” home and heart but takes too long to overcome his aversion to his companion’s disreputable past (she is pregnant with another man’s baby) and loses her forever.

Loss is at the heart of Berberova’s Billancourt world – loss of homeland, history, love, hope – just as it seems to have been, at times, in her own life, where a different kind of loss may help explain why she stopped writing stories when she did. Berberova’s coherent community of exiles unraveled after World War II. Displaced once again, and in more ways than one, Berberova lost her subject matter, her regular form of publication and her readership. Determined as ever, though, she moved on – to nonfiction, to teaching, to her new American life. Sadly for her readers, Berberova’s story-making impulse stayed behind, in France, in her past. But we are lucky too: We have these “new” stories, and for the lives they commemorate and the particular time and place they so keenly preserve, we cherish them.

She died of complications from a fall last March, said Dr. Murl G. Barker, a friend, who is chairman of the Russian department at Rutgers University.

Miss Berberova is best known for her 1969 autobiography, "The Italics Are Mine," written during the years 1960 to 1965. Many of the figures in the worlds of émigré arts and politics -- including Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxim Gorky and Fyodor Sologub -- come vividly alive in her reminiscences.

"She has brilliantly evoked the atmosphere of literary Petrograd," wrote a critic in The New York Times Book Review in 1969, adding that the memoirs "have yielded some remarkable portraits and vignettes." The book was re-issued last year by Alfred A. Knopf in a revised translation.

A Film From Her Novella

Recognition for her fiction came late, but French, German and English critics have compared Miss Berberova's sharp, incisive writing to that of Turgenev's and Chekhov's. Her 1934 novella "The Accompanist," about a young woman pianist who accompanies and competes with a soprano, was made into a film this year by the French director Claude Miller.

A selection of Miss Berberova's novellas, "The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels," was published by Knopf in 1991. Michiko Kakutani, writing in The Times, said: "Long overdue in America, this collection of stories deserves a wide and appreciative audience, while Miss Berberova herself deserves recognition as one of the most captivating Russian writers alive today."

Her fiction has been on best-seller lists in France, and she was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government in 1989.

Miss Berberova (pronounced bur-BEAR-uh-vuh) was born in 1901 in St. Petersburg; her father was an Armenian civil servant; her mother was Russian. She attended Rostov University and was involved in the literary and artistic ferment in that city until she left in 1922, accompanying the poet Vladislav Khodasevich. Together they traveled about Europe as members of the household of Maxim Gorky, before settling in Paris in 1925. Reported the News

Miss Berberova then began a 15-year affiliation with the Russian-language daily Poslednye Novosti, reporting news events and writing book reviews, critical articles, short fiction and theater and movie reviews. She was also one of the founders of the émigré weekly Russkaya Mysl' in 1947.

She wrote four novels and "Tchaikovsky," a biography of the composer. Appearing in 1937, the book created a sensation because it dealt openly with the composer's homosexuality.

In 1950 Miss Berberova immigrated to the United States, working at a variety of jobs until she became the editor of the journal Mosty. In 1958 she joined the Slavic department at Yale University, and in 1963 she moved on to Princeton, where she taught until 1971.

Miss Berberova was the partner of Khodasevich until the 1930's, but they were never married. She married Nikolai Makeyev, a journalist, in 1937; and in the 1950's, George Kochevitsky, a musician who died last month. Both marriages ended in divorce.

Miss Berberova, who became a United States citizen, returned to Russia in 1989.

She received an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College in 1983, and another from Yale University last year. She moved from Princeton to Philadelphia in 1990. -- Glenn Collins, New York Times, September 29, 1993

By Nina Berberova

Translated by Marian Schwartz and Richard D. Sylvester

New York Review Books, 2005

Baroness Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya Benckendorff Budberg hailed from the Russian aristocracy and lived in the lap of luxury—until the Bolshevik Revolution forced her to live by her wits. Thereafter her existence was a story of connivance and stratagem, a succession of unlikely twists and turns. Intimately involved in the mysterious Lockhart affair, a conspiracy which almost brought down the fledgling Soviet state, mistress to Maxim Gorky and then to H.G. Wells, Moura was a woman of enormous energy, intelligence, and charm whose deepest passion was undoubtedly the mythologization of her own life.

Recognized as one of the great masters of Russian twentieth-century fiction, Nina Berberova here proves again that she is the unsurpassed chronicler of the lives of Soviet émigrés. In Moura Budberg, a woman who shrouded the facts of her life in fiction, Berberova finds the ideal material from which to craft a triumph of literary portraiture, a book as engaging and as full of life and incident as any one of her celebrated novels.

Review

Moura is not a spy novel, I confess, but it was written by the Russian novelist and short-story writer Nina Berberova, and the book—subtitled “The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg”—affords all the pleasures of first-rate fiction. The mysterious baroness, known as Moura, was likely a Soviet spy and possibly a double agent, as Berberova shows in this intricate biography, one that is also a meditation on Bolsheviks, penniless Baltic nobility and the attractions of the femme fatale. (Moura’s lovers included Maxim Gorky, H.G. Wells and the British spy Robert Lockhart.) Berberova (1901-93), who knew Moura when they both lived in Gorky’s chaotic household in the 1920s, was an émigré in occupied Paris during World War II, then moved to the U.S., where she taught at Princeton. Though Moura was published in Russian in 1981, it didn’t appear in English until four years ago, with Marian Schwartz and Richard D. Sylvester’s translation. As many readers discovered then, Berberova is a splendid writer who deserves to be better known. – Alan Furst, Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2009

Review

Berberova's Tattered Cloak (1991) is a cherished work of Russian émigré literature, as is her scintillating autobiography, The Italics Are Mine (1992). Her own favorite book was this dramatic, richly descriptive, and historically illuminating biography of a fellow Russian refugee and a woman for all seasons, Moura Budberg, a work just now published in English. Berberova (1901-93) met the smart, tough, and resourceful Moura, a slender woman with a "feline smile," when they were both part of the celebrated writer Maxim Gorky's unconventional household during the turbulent 1920s, and Berberova never forgot the highly influential yet persistently enigmatic baroness. Ultimately, Moura—multilingual, alluring, and invincible—was involved not only with Gorky but also with the daring diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart (his story alone is worth a book) and H.G. Wells. Given the volatile times and Moura's masterful practice of the art of survival, Berberova takes on a complex and compelling tale of political upheaval, espionage, sexual passion, and all the suffering wrought by war, poverty, oppression, and exile, and tells it brilliantly with empathy and panache. -- Donna Seaman, Booklist, 2005

Review

Nina Berberova's Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg chronicles a riveting moment in modern history through the eyes of Baroness Maria ("Moura") Ignatievna Zakrevskaya Beckendorff Budberg, a Russian aristocrat forced to employ great cunning to survive in the post-Revolution. This is not, however, a straightforward biography. Nina Berberova, an acclaimed writer of fiction who spent the latter part of her life as a professor of Russian literature at Princeton University, has an admittedly complicated relationship to the people and events she details so richly in this book. With her companion, the poet Vladislav Khodasevich, Berberova lived in the Gorky household with Moura for three years. While she claims in her Preface to be committed to presenting an unbiased portrait of her subject, her personal reminiscences (which are not always favorable) clearly form and inform the rendering of Moura the reader finds here.

Moura's viability as a biographical subject rests almost entirely on her role as mistress in the lives of three notable twentieth-century men: Robert Bruce Lockhart (of the Lockhart Affair, a 1918 plot to overthrow the nascent Bolshevik government), H.G. Wells, and Maxim Gorky, with whom she lived for several years. Her independent achievements (as a translator, mostly, though not a very good one, according to Berberova, and as a probable secret agent) receive as little attention in her biography as they seem to have received in her life. Moura's gifts were more amorphous. She was an individual who was naturally inclined to seek romance, and her tremendous charm was a powerful intoxicant to men: in some ways, her devotion to them became a career of its own.

Moura is thick with wartime intrigue. The account of the dramatic relationship between Moura and Lockhart, the British diplomat who became a secret agent in the aftermath of the Bolshevik seizure of power and very nearly toppled the regime, reads like a thriller. Though they later reunite, the love affair culminates with Moura saving Lockhart from probable execution by convincing a Cheka deputy to let him go home to England. The two are separated, but their lives are spared.

The book also sheds light on facets of the frightening and all-consuming transition to Soviet life: the dire post-Revolution economic situation and the culture of newly impoverished intelligentsia it produced, as well as the battle (often literal, with a toll paid in artists' lives) to maintain some semblance of creative freedom under the new dictatorship. (This struggle is epitomized in the bitter rivalry between Gorky and his literary community and Grigori Zinoviev, who would become head of the Comintern in 1919, and exert fierce government control over creative expression). In fact, much of the book serves as a chilling reminder of just how unremittingly violent the Soviet experiment was at its inception.

Against this backdrop, the irrepressible energy of Moura and her circle of friends in the Gorky household, and their abiding affection for one another, seem all the more courageous. In a climate of terror, they faced hunger, poverty, interrogation, imprisonment, and exile of all kinds, but Moura especially managed throughout her life graceful, even heroic, escapes from the various conditions of misery history sought to impose upon her. Lockhart has written of her: "Where she loved, there was her world, and her philosophy of life had made her mistress of all the consequences."

Whether a product of Berberova's rendering or the actual events of Moura's life, or both, the woman we find in these pages, while deeply satisfying in the role of mistress and subject of history, often disappoints. Moura was an impressively resilient individual, and even at her most hungry, harried, and depleted, Gorky's "iron woman" had an unsinkable spirit, and a fierce will not only to live, but to absorb and be nourished by her experiences in the world. But at times she appears as little more than just the connecting tissue between the important men of action she knew and loved. In detailing its complicated context, the book sometimes feels as though it isn't about Moura, but about the more dramatic or more interesting lives going on around her. Moura was suspected of being a secret agent (for Britain and for the USSR) for much of her life, but it is, ironically, a greater degree of agency one wishes Berberova has bestowed upon her here, a more primary role in the fascinating historical drama to which she bore witness. -- Nina Aron, Words Without Borders

Review

The Golden Age, the Dark Ages. The Age of Chivalry and the Age of Anxiety. The Nuclear Age ... All these are familiar enough concepts, and useful shorthand for a historical nexus, a unique cultural brew probably only ever recognizable in retrospect. But what is meant by an "age," exactly? The gods presumably live, love and quarrel eternally. Closer to our own times, according to biblical tradition, the allotted age of man is a comparatively measly three-score years and ten. And while science and nutrition have very recently succeeded in pushing the life-span envelope for the wealthy of this earth, 70 years remains a fortunate outcome for most.

Occasionally, one extraordinary person's life story appears to capture the essence of his or her place and time. In the wake of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, and during the unstable post-Versailles "peace," an entrancing St. Petersburg native known to friends as "Moura" -- political conspirator, emigre, lover and beloved of great men -- rose to such iconic significance. But biographer Nina Berberova, herself the celebrated emigre author of stories and novellas about Russians in Paris, hardly turned to writing Moura's life in order to burnish a legend. As companion to the poet Vladislav Khodasevich in Maxim Gorky's entourage, the young Berberova spent years in the shadow of the older, powerful woman, whose contradictions and evasions impressed and intrigued her. In Berberova's "Moura," the only icon is the truth.

Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya, later Countess Benckendorff, still later Baroness Budberg, was born in 1892 and died, in Italy, in 1974. As Berberova notes, "that generation, born between 1890 and 1900, was almost completely destroyed." Moura's upbringing as the daughter of a government official was dangerously comfortable, featuring a girls' boarding school followed by "finishing off" in London society. And yet she went on to survive by her wits and grit through chaotic and desperate times, first in the wartime Soviet Union and then, self-exiled, in the West. Berberova offers a partial explanation for Moura's resilience: "She was clever and tough and fully aware of her uncommon abilities. ... She learned to rely on her physical health and energy, and on her own considerable charm as a woman. She knew how to be among people, how to live with them, how to choose them and get along with them."

However, as this meticulous, gracefully translated account shows, the truly spellbinding aspect of Moura's story lies not so much in the tricks and turns of physical survival as in her refusal, or perhaps innate incapacity, to trade off even a morsel of her spirit to what might be called the Age of Intimidation. Of course, Moura was far from being a starry-eyed idealist. But she loved art and laughter and style; she lived life with both hands full; she chose her men well, and was in turn protected by such Age-dominating figures as Gorky and H.G. Wells. She cloaked her comings and goings in mystery, and with a noble disregard for petty factuality successfully cultivated her image as a high-born aristo-Bolshevik and prolific multilingual translator, though actually her father had no claim to title and her translations for Gorky into English were few, sketchy and for the most part unusable. Given her close relationships with foreigners and political figures, it was easy to suspect her of being a secret agent, working perhaps for the Allies, or the Germans, or the Reds or the Whites -- or all simultaneously. Rumors clung to her. After all, she was the cat who always landed on its feet.

Even (or especially) in hard times, a woman who exudes personal allure, intelligence and enigma provides the combustible stuff of romantic drama. In 1934, film director Michael Curtiz, later of "Casablanca" fame, released to acclaim "British Agent," which featured Kay Francis as Moura in the female lead. The screenplay was based more or less on the autobiography of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, himself a man who proved to have at least seven lives. For his first posting in his British diplomatic career the young Lockhart was sent to Russia, a culture he took to immediately. In 1918, an attractive, witty, insouciant young Russian turned up on the doorstep of the British Embassy in Petrograd, seeking connections after the murder of her first husband, an Estonian landowner, by rampaging peasants. Stranded penniless and separated from her two children, Moura made herself useful. Lockhart, who had a wife in England, fell gradually, but hard.

As times worsened, Moura moved in with him, and as other diplomats fled the capital and missions shut down like dominoes, Lockhart stayed on, now charged, as "special agent," with preventing Vladimir Lenin from signing a separate peace with Germany. Passionately committed both to Russia and the Allied cause, he was in the thick of one audacious intrigue after another. He collaborated with the flamboyant, megalomaniac master of disguises Sidney Reilly to turn Latvian troops to the Allied side. He was a close confidante of Leon Trotsky and, until betrayed by someone unknown but very close to him, of Lenin. Finally, after he and Moura and others were arrested, interrogated and released, he left for the West. It would be six years before Lockhart would see Moura again. When she finally found him, in Prague, he wrote in his journal: "Went home in a stupor of uncertainty. ... She looked older. Her face was more serious and she had a few gray hairs. ... The change was in me. ... I admired her above all other women. ... But the old feelings were gone."

Without hammering the point too hard, Berberova makes clear her view that Lockhart was the true passionate love of Moura's life. But hers was a life that could ill-afford romantic regrets. At the time of the Prague reunion she was Gorky's mistress in Italy, already matriarch of his huge "family," as well as his nurse, secretary and interpreter. After the writer's return to the Soviet Union in 1933, she took up with Wells, his collaborator in the dream of perfecting mankind through mass education, and remained with him until his final tormented year. A strong theme of idealism, of service to a greater public good, unites Moura's lovers and friends. Arguably, both Gorky and Wells died haunted by a dawning recognition that they had sacrificed prodigious artistic gifts to a utopian chimera. But for all the pathos of great men disillusioned, it is Moura's relationship with Lockhart -- from whom she never completely broke -- that makes Berberova's biography an intimate and moving experience.

The intimacy stems in part from Berberova's personal witness. She describes her younger self soaking up Moura's overwhelming presence with mixed feelings: "In her break with her grandmothers and great-grandmothers, ... I saw my own break with my past. ... Only one thing bothered me: her enigma, her mystery, and her lies had in them a streak of something dark and devious I could never quite understand. Shouldn't I try to overcome that? How fine it would be if there were no ambiguity behind the masks."

For all of this, the private Moura feels strangely absent in Berberova's book, while Lockhart, Gorky and others come through sharply. Is this only due to the author's principled disdain for the current fashion in biography of attributing made-up emotions and words? The book's assumption of a readership well-versed in Soviet names and dates also makes for elliptical going here and there. But such flaws are dwarfed by Berberova's gift for reviving in vivid close-up an entire historical age -- an age of impassioned commitment, right or wrong. An age of heroes. -- Kai Maristed, Context, August 5, 2005

Review

“She was undoubtedly one of the exceptional women of her time – a time that showed no mercy or pity toward her or her generation. That generation, born between 1890 and 1900, was almost completely destroyed by war, revolution, emigration, the camps, and the terror of the 1930s.”

So Nina Berberova characterizes Moura Budberg, a “mystery woman” if ever there was one. Variously suspected of spying for the Germans during World War I, for the British in the ill-fated Lockhart affair of 1918-19 (a conspiracy that almost brought down the fledgling Soviet Union) and for the Soviets much of the rest of the time, Moura was also immensely alluring to men. Her romance with British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart was recounted by him in his enormously successful memoir “British Agent,” the basis for the colorful 1934 film of that title.

Moura’s vitality, intelligence and charm made her indispensable to Maxim Gorky, who declared: “[S]he knows everything and is interested in everything.” Her long liaison with H.G. Wells seems to have provided the aging, increasingly querulous author with a sense of sympathy and comfort.

Born in 1892 into an upper-class Russian family, Moura spent time in England before the war, hobnobbing with diplomats, aristocrats, writers and celebrities, including two who would later play a larger role in her life: Wells and Lockhart. There she also met Ivan Benckendorff, a diplomat, whom she wed in 1911.

In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, Benckendorff was clubbed to death by peasants from a village near his family’s Estonian estate. The couple’s two children managed to escape with their English governess, while Moura had the good fortune to be in Petrograd – as St. Petersburg was known then.

Moura came by the name Budberg and the title of baroness in 1922, when she wed Baron Nikolai Budberg, a down-and-out Estonian aristocrat, in what Berberova describes as a marriage of mutual convenience. Moura, who’d just fled Russia, gained a title and Estonian citizenship; it’s less clear, from this account, exactly what was in it for him. All this time, Moura was Gorky’s mistress and a pivotal member of his household, working as his secretary, translator and literary agent. It was to Moura that he entrusted his papers when he returned from Europe to Russia, fearing what might happen were they to fall into Stalin’s hands, which, alas, they did.

Although Berberova does not state unequivocally that Moura was a Soviet agent, the inference seems clear enough.

Berberova, who fled Russia in 1922, lived for three years under the same roof with Moura in the Gorky household. Although she never became an intimate of the wily enchantress, she was in a good position to observe her: “Her energy, her vitality, her desperate instinct for survival were all things I could feel and understand

Berberova, who died in 1993 at age 92, recounted her life story in a memorable book published in 1992: “The Italics Are Mine.” She began work on Moura’s biography in the late 1970s, and it was first published in Russian in 1981. The book did not find a British or American publisher until now, although Marian Schwartz and Richard D. Sylvester embarked on their English translation in 1980. The Russian version, they inform us, is longer, containing more historical background previously unknown to Russian readers but familiar to Westerners.

Like its subject, “Moura” is hard to categorize: It is less a close-up of the secretive Budberg than a kaleidoscopic look at the world in which she lived. Berberova brings to life not only Moura’s lovers, but also a host of other people, many of whom she knew personally, who were caught up in the turmoil and betrayals of those years. In a way, the unsung heroine of “Moura” is Berberova herself, combing through archives and memories and serving as the prism though which history is refracted. -- Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2005

Review

"Moura? Moura Budberg? Now where have I heard that name before?" So many serious readers will ask themselves, as they glance at the cover of this book, then pause to study the attractive if somewhat round-cheeked face pictured there. The woman's smile looks coy, even pixieish, while her eyes stare out aslant, at once lively, tender and shrewd. The man next to her sports a heavy, brush mustache, and was once world-famous: the Russian writer Maxim Gorky.

Over the course of her long life, Moura Zakrevskaya (1892-1974) was to take on many identities. Born the daughter of a former Russian senator and state council member for St. Petersburg, she married twice, becoming initially the Countess Benckendorff and then the Baroness Budberg. During the upheavals before, during and after the Russian Revolution, she fell in love with the celebrated British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, the man who nearly toppled the Bolshevik government (with the aid of the notorious Sidney Reilly, "ace of spies"). Later, she joined Gorky's household as his secretary and mistress. Finally, in the 1930s, she lived with H.G. Wells and cared for him through his final illness. For the last 20 years of her own life, she was an enigmatic presence on the London cultural scene -- mysterious, hard-drinking, increasingly obese, known as a translator, suspected of being a spy. But for whom?

One thing is certain: Moura was an "iron woman," and did whatever was necessary to survive and protect those she loved. After Dora Kaplan's attempted assassination of Lenin in 1918, Lockhart was jailed and faced probable execution, but Moura somehow convinced Yakov Peters, the Cheka deputy in charge of the Lubyanka prison, to allow the English agent to go home to England. How? She had no money, no connections, no power.

Maxim Gorky once told a story about a very similar Cheka official who longed to make love to a countess and during the Red Terror finally found his chance. Moura was sensuously beautiful -- and the widow of a count beaten to death during the Revolution. What mattered was to save Lockhart. No surprise, then, that the urbane Peters was seen holding Moura by the hand as she was released from her own cell in the Lubyanka. Years later -- after Peters had been "purged" by Stalin -- Nina Berberova was present (in Sorrento, with Vesuvius in the background) when Moura was asked about the men around her former lover. Reilly, she murmured, was "brave," but the jailer Peters was -- and she paused for a long moment -- "kind."

Once Lockhart was safely back in England, Moura sold her diamond engagement earrings, the last of her possessions, and bought a ticket to Petrograd, where she resided briefly with a lieutenant general. There, she eventually wangled an invitation to Gorky's house, where she might have met Pavlov, Dr. Voronov (who developed the monkey-gland treatment that was to reinvigorate the elderly Yeats), Evgeny Zamyatin (author of We , which inspired Orwell's 1984 ), the singer Chaliapin, and many other leading intellectuals and cultural figures of the time, among them the visiting H.G. Wells. The English novelist shared with Gorky a belief in human progress and social betterment through mass education. Alas, in their later works, both writers fell into polemics and didacticism. As Berberova, herself a distinguished novelist, bluntly says of Gorky:

"He wrote thirty volumes but he never understood that literature offers only an indirect answer to life, that art involves play and mystery, that there is a riddle in art that has nothing to do with flaying an opponent, humorless glorification, righteous living, or radical convictions. That riddle is as impossible to explain to someone who has not experienced it as it would be to explain a rainbow to someone blind from birth or an orgasm to a virgin."

Early in the 1920s, Moura decided to visit her two children (by her dead husband), whom she had not seen in several years, and so traveled -- without any papers -- to Talinn, the capital of Estonia. As she was about to hail a cab, she was arrested, interrogated and thrown into jail as a Soviet spy. Eventually, she cut a deal with her lawyer. An aristocratic Estonian wastrel was in need of cash and in exchange for it was willing to marry Moura, thus giving her an Estonian passport -- and the chance to travel freely around Europe as the new "Baroness Budberg." Moura could get money from the infatuated and generous Gorky, who was going to live in Sicily for a few years because of his poor health. An iron woman does what she has to.

There's no need to detail the rest of the Baroness Budberg's remarkable story. And much of its detail cannot be known. Eventually, Moura again met Robert Bruce Lockhart and may have become his roving agent. Gorky left all his papers with her when he returned to Russia, but then she was so harassed by the Soviets that she apparently delivered the archives to Stalin -- possibly in exchange for a last visit to her old lover, possibly at the dying writer's own request, possibly for other, unknown reasons. Most troubling is the likely use of those papers: Many of the letters to the politically influential Gorky spoke critically of Stalin's policies and may have added fuel to the show trials and purges of the 1930s.

By this time, though, Moura had seriously committed herself to H.G. Wells. Once Somerset Maugham asked what she saw in "the paunchy, played out writer." Moura sweetly answered, "He smells of honey."

Although Moura's life provides the thread of this biography, Berberova enriches the story with pen portraits of revolutionaries, spies, international financiers and what seem like half the characters from an Eric Ambler thriller. My favorite is Alexander Parvus, who left Russia at 19 for Switzerland, where he met Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and Lenin. He actually originated the notion of "permanent revolution," churned out scores of theoretical articles about politics and revolution, traveled on false passports to Russia and was eventually arrested with Trotsky in 1905. Exiled to Siberia, he escaped. Once back in Europe he managed to lay his hands on 130,000 gold German marks from Max Reinhardt's productions of "The Lower Depths" and other Gorky plays. He was supposed to keep the money safe for their author. Instead, he started a new life in the Ottoman Empire, working first as an arms merchant for Krupp and later as a dealer in grain and coal as well as weapons. By 1915 he was the chief adviser to the German general staff on the revolutionary movement in Russia. In 1917 he was instrumental in helping Lenin make his way from Switzerland to Petrograd, where the Bolshevik leader would alter the history of the world.

After the German defeat in World War I, Parvus bought a castle outside of Zurich, "installed women, old friends whom he wined and dined, and all sorts of riffraff. The Swiss authorities deported him to Germany for having 'orgies.' In 1920 he bought another castle, or rather, palace, outside Berlin, on Wannsee Island. There he lived on a grand scale, receiving throngs of friends, among them former ministers, diplomats, German Social Democrats, and members of the government. He was surrounded by liveried butlers, secretaries, a majordomo, and a chef. He prescribed his own etiquette. The riffraff were now gone. The women were high-class coquettes, actresses, beauties." Parvus publicly criticized the Treaty of Versailles, duly predicted World War II and even paid back the money he had stolen from Gorky.

There are many such colorful bit players in Moura , and one of the most fascinating is the author of this biography herself. Nina Berberova, only a little younger than her subject, went into exile with the Russian poet Khodasevich during the 1920s, lived many years in Paris, wrote highly acclaimed works of biography and fiction (The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels), and ended her life as a professor of Russian at Princeton, dying in her nineties. This, she felt, was her best book. Some readers may still prefer her fine autobiography, The Italics Are Mine .

Berberova concludes her preface to Moura with a low-keyed sentence that brings both tears and a chill. More than anything else, she says, Moura appreciated "the joy of a free private life unhampered by a moral code of 'what the neighbors might say'; the joy of surviving intact; the joy of knowing she had not been destroyed by those she loved." -- Michael Dirda, Washington Post, May 22, 2005

Thirteen newly discovered stories by the great Russian writer, translated into English for the first time. Now added to the quartet of books by Nina Berberova that New Directions has presented for the delight of American readers is this delectable baker's dozen—Billancourt Tales. These are thirteen stories (Berberova called them "Fiestas") chosen from those she wrote in Paris between 1928 and 1940 for the émigré newspaper The Latest News. In her preface Berberova mentions how she found what to write about through her discovery of Billancourt, a highly industrialized suburb of Paris. Here thousands of exiled Russians—White Guards and civilians—were finding work and establishing homes away from home with their Russian churches, schools, and small business ventures. Berberova thought the significance of the tales was in their historical and sociological aspects rather than in their artistry but the reader will demur, for these are fine stories, the kind that have led to comparisons to Chekhov. They portray a wide range of human beings and the twists and turns of their various lives. There is Ivan Pavlovich making a success of his rabbit farm but procrastinating too long about a proposal of marriage; Kondurin, happy to play the piano in restaurants rather than working as a bookkeeper—his only problem is the restaurants keep going out of business; and Gavrilovich who loses a job as an actor in the movies because the scene requires him to steal a lady's purse and even though it is make believe he just can't do it. All in all a group of very Russian tales very well told.

Kirkus Reviews:

A winning collection of 13 previously untranslated stories about exiles living in Paris in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution, written for an émigré newspaper in the years 1928–40 by the late (1901–93) author of The Tattered Cloak (1991) and the moving autobiography The Italics Are Mine (not reviewed). They're Chekhovian sketches focused on "déclassé intellectuals" and variously thwarted souls, like the gifted pianist who cannot rise above his unfulfilling job as a bookkeeper ("An Incident With Music"), a "rabbit farmer" unable to accept the pregnant woman who offers an escape from his loneliness ("The Argentine"), and a hopeful inventor whose formula for success is repeatedly frustrated ("About the Hooks"). Though disappointment and resignation are the prevailing moods, Berberova also surprises us—with the stories of a reluctant "guardian" whose demanding niece later becomes her protector ("The Little Stranger") and of a supposedly failed writer who, it is later learned, "had died of imagination.” Delicately fashioned cameos that deserve a place among the minor classics of expatriate fiction.

Publishers Weekly, November 27, 2001:

The pursuit of fulfillment monetary, psychological or romantic is at the heart of all 13 of these fleet-footed and poignant short stories about life in a Paris suburb settled by Russian émigrés during the 1930s. Originally written ... more » for an émigré newspaper, the tales emanate grace even when describing loss and pain. In "The Argentine," a man's attempt to match a single friend with an unmarried woman fails when the woman reveals that she is pregnant and then leaves town before the hesitant suitor can claim her. In "About the Hooks," a man travels into Paris from Billancourt to sell a patent to an industrialist, even bringing a puppy for the industrialist's daughter. The first meeting is promising, but before their second meeting, the young inventor sleeps on a park bench, the puppy dies and the industrialist expires as well. Some stories offer redemption and happiness at the end, all the more welcome for the degradation that precedes them. A lonely, aging woman who is the protagonist of "The Little Stranger" is forced to become her niece's guardian; against all expectations, the girl brightens the woman's later years. In "The Violin of Billancourt," a formerly genteel woman reunites with a long-avoided suitor when they have both encountered hardships and need companionship for survival. The narrator of "The Billancourt Manuscript" changes his formerly negative opinion of a deceased acquaintance after reading a mystical unfinished manuscript (reprinted in the story) bequeathed to him by the deceased. These stories occur against the impressionistic and often seductive backdrop of Billancourt, with its leafy promenades, dilapidated back streets and socially ambitious gentry, all attentively recreated by Berberova's ever-observant eye. At once unsparing and subtle, these stories illuminate a sociological minority struggling to find solid footing in a radically transformed world.

Michael Upchurch, “Little Russia,” New York Times, December 2, 2001:

''I know this feeling increasingly: falling from our usual dimension into another.'' These words come from ''The Italics Are Mine,'' the 1969 autobiography of Nina Berberova, who was born in Russia in 1901 and died in the United States in 1993. And while they refer specifically to the vertigolike sensation of living in St. Petersburg during the Russian Revolution, they could apply equally well to other dislocating episodes in Berberova's long life: her move in 1925, after interludes in Berlin, Prague and Italy, to Paris, where she lived for 25 years; her experience of occupied France as a Third Reich fief following the Nazi invasion; and her final migration, in 1950, from Europe to America.

Berberova eventually flourished in her adopted homeland, becoming a professor of Russian literature, first at Yale University and then at Princeton. But it was her life in Paris that figured most prominently in her fiction, notably her novels, ''Cape of Storms'' and ''The Book of Happiness,'' and numerous shorter works, among them her brilliant novella ''The Accompanist.''

Her hallmark strengths—a whimsy and cool resolve that, in tandem, functioned as a wry stoicism—came together most powerfully in ''The Resurrection of Mozart,'' a story set during the fall of France in 1940. Pitting a ghost of civilization (a bewildered Mozart who is accidentally summoned from beyond the grave) against ''the omens of war,'' Berberova weighs what's at stake as German air raids shatter Europe's peace. While civilization appears momentarily eclipsed, there's an unspoken confidence that its ghosts will endure and eventually be resurrected, even if it is into a world altered beyond recognition.

At first glance, ''Billancourt Tales,'' a freshly translated collection of Berberova's earliest fiction, seems unlikely to bear comparison with anything as fine as ''The Resurrection of Mozart.'' Berberova herself was somewhat disparaging about these stories, written in the 1920's and 30's, which depict exiled Russians living in the industrial Parisian suburb of Billancourt. In ''The Italics Are Mine,'' she described them as ''a lyrico-ironical series of stories about Billancourt-Russian indigents, drunks, patresfamilias, Renault workers, courtyard singers, déclassé eccentrics.'' She explained that ''some were written in a hurry for money, with low-level results, but at least half a dozen of them were very much to the point.''

Berberova didn't do herself justice. The 13 stories of ''Billancourt Tales'' are closely observed, potently phrased and dapperly shaped. Sly and heartfelt, they strike a note of picaresque melancholy as Berberova examines an eclectic assortment of Russian plights and fates.

The chronically unemployed Gerasim Gavrilovich, for instance, blows his chance at a movie career in ''Photogénique'' because he can't reconcile himself to playing the part of a thief, while 19-year-old Antonina Nikolaevna Selindrina unexpectedly becomes the title character in ''The Argentine'' after a brief, eventful passage through Paris. In these and other stories, life-changing moves (you can't call them decisions) are made on the fly. The wife of Ivan Ivanovich Kondurin says it best in ''An Incident With Music'' when she tells her pianist husband, stuck in a bookkeeping job and looking for a way out, ''Fate is playing games with you.''

Acting as master of ceremonies over these games is Grigory Andreevich, or Grisha, as his friends know him. A sometime employee at the factory of ''Monsieur Renault,'' Grisha serves as narrator in most of the stories, a role inspired in part by his knack for playing the confidant to a wide circle of friends and acquaintances.

On occasion, Grisha is the star of his own tale, as in the cross-continental romance recounted in ''Versts and Sleeping Cars.'' (Grisha, an infantryman on the run from the Red Army, becomes ''engaged'' to a woman who later turns up in Prague and Paris, sometimes remembering her fiancé, sometimes not.) More often he's on the sidelines, observing all that goes on. Berberova, just offstage and pulling the strings, has plenty of fun with him, occasionally introducing a note of metafiction into the proceedings. When wrapping up ''Photogénique,'' for instance, Grisha is forced to be frank with the story's failed movie star. ''Nowadays,'' he explains, after hearing out Gerasim Gavrilovich's account of his failure as a silver-screen villain, ''the papers prefer to write about the opposite, about jutting chins and people getting ahead. I'm afraid no one's going to want to read about you.''

In one lurid tale of jealousy and murder, ''A Gypsy Romance,'' Grisha doesn't narrate at all, but is glimpsed in the corner of the cafe where the action takes place, drunkenly toasting an endless lineup of ''charming'' Russian-born Parisiennes. Whether he's acting the fool or bluntly acknowledging the hard knocks of his fellow exiles (''What man in our day hasn't been tempered in life's battles? For us, there is no such man''), he's crucial in maintaining the book's fine balance between the droll and the poignant.

Marian Schwartz's English translation deftly captures the fanciful twists and turns of Berberova's imagination, whether she's waxing acerbic on the stifling nature of the city's industrial suburbs (''If it weren't for the Paris wind we'd have nothing to breathe in Billancourt'') or detailing male Sunday attire circa 1929: ''Parts ran across heads like bright shoelaces, took a turn eight and a half centimeters above the ear and, rounding the crown in a free line, descended to a starched collar.'' Berberova can write more straightforwardly, too. But even the most sweeping or plaintive outbursts of her lost souls (''Your spaces, your seasons, your climate—none of them suit me'') have a downbeat verve.

By the end of the book, Billancourt emerges as a character in itself, a working-class enclave whose very name serves as shorthand for keeping tough in tough times. ''There is no end or limit to Billancourt,'' Berberova writes in the book's closing story, ''nor will there ever be.''

With this volume in hand, the realities of a long-vanished Russian émigré community reach far indeed beyond their original temporal and geographical limits. It may have taken them over half a century to touch our shores, but now that we have them, they feel indispensable.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, 2002:

Nina Berberova's Billancourt Tales comprises thirteen slender, artful stories of émigré life as played out in Billancourt, a Russian suburb of Paris, during the 1920s and early thirties. Nabokov's biographer, Brian Boyd, has dubbed Berberova "the most important novelist other than Nabokov himself to emerge in the emigration"--an apt coupling, considering that Berberova's stories share striking affinities with the Russian master's stories of the emigration. But the tales bear Chekhov's stamp as well, particularly in their unremitting pessimism. Nearly every story ends bleakly, a fact that Grisha, the recurring narrator, ties to the fate of the Russian emigration generally. But this fatalism hardly detracts from the delicacy and seductiveness of Berberova's early work. As Marian Schwartz explains, Berberova, convinced that her later fiction was more mature stylistically, "came to view her Billancourt `fiestas' as of purely sociological interest," but this is to judge these pieces too harshly. Berberova's writing is spare, ironic, and lucid, which throws her characters into greater relief. There is the old woman who longs to see her first love one last time--and does. There is the man who throws his wife out, then spends his days waiting for her to crawl back--only to discover that she has died. Another man, tired of traveling but pining for companionship, gets engaged to an enigmatic young woman but loses her when he fails to follow her to America. Many of these stories are romances, with the emphasis on male loneliness. This motif derives from the setting. Many Billancourt émigrés worked in the Renault factory; deemed unfit for such work, women were not allowed to immigrate in numbers. Thus Berberova lends her tales a final twist of melancholy: not only has the Russian Revolution shattered the dream of a homeland but the dream of a home as well.

Cape of Storms, one of the great Russian writer's most fascinating novels, was published serially in 1951 in the Novyi Zhurnal -- and Nina Berberova herself, late in life, took the old migr journals off a shelf and handed them to distinguished translator Marian Schwartz. Now this forgotten, riveting late masterpiece is available in English for the first time.

Centering on three half-sisters, Cape of Storms treats a very specific generation, born in Russia but raised in Paris: a lost generation, having suffered childhood traumas, and now neither really Russian nor truly French. The three sisters -- Dasha, Sonia, and Zai -- share the same father, Tiagin (portrayed by Berberova as an attractive, weak-willed womanizing White Russian). As the specter of war looms, and the sisters enter adulthood, each chooses a different path: Dasha marries and leaves for a bourgeois, expatriate life in colonial Africa; Sonia studies philosophy, becomes obsessed with radical politics, and ends a suicide; Zai, the youngest, an appealing adolescent, flirts with becoming an actress or a poet. It is a shattering book, which opens with an absolutely hair-raising scene of Dasha witnessing her mother's murder at the hands of Bolshevik thugs, and ends as the blitzkrieg sweeps towards Paris. Cape of Storms is unparalleled in Berberova's work for its high drama, its starkness, and many shifts of mood and viewpoint.

Review

“The Three Sisters”

The third of Nina Berberova's books to be published posthumously in English, ''Cape of Storms'' follows in the wake of ''The Ladies From St. Petersburg,'' a trio of novellas, and a novel entitled, not entirely ironically, ''The Book of Happiness.'' Berberova, who was born in Russia in 1901, spent the last four decades of her life in the United States, where she died in 1993. Yet for many years her fiction was not widely available in English, and it was the republication of her work to great acclaim in France that led to her ''discovery'' on these shores. Berberova's longtime friend and translator, Marian Schwartz, has aided considerably in this process, rendering Berberova's distinctive Russian into fine and elegant English.

Berberova has been compared to her great Russian antecedents -- Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov -- and not without reason. The first two novellas in ''The Ladies From St. Petersburg,'' produced early in her career, share a ruthlessly Chekhovian simplicity and precision of detail, while the last novella, written later in life, owes a greater debt to Gogol. In contrast, ''Cape of Storms,'' which was initially published serially in 1951 in Novy Zhurnal, has a very different feel. An interior novel that aims somehow to articulate the ineffable, it seems to draw more from Dostoyevsky.

Berberova's work repeatedly describes the experience of White Russians at the time of the revolution and afterward, and ''Cape of Storms'' is no exception. The story of three half sisters living under their father's roof in Paris between the world wars, it depicts the vastly differing choices that set the course of their adult lives. It is not a book, however, in which plot is intended to function as the central element: although filled with powerful and glittering scenes, this is largely an examination -- rigorous and at times oblique -- of the young women's psyches, of their metaphysical quests.

The book opens with Dasha, the eldest of the three, recalling the terrible day of her mother's murder by the Bolsheviks, an event that is described in haunting, almost surreal detail. Saved by her mother's lover, Alexei Andreyevich Boiko, she is eventually collected by her father, Tiagin, from whom her mother had long been separated, and taken to live with Liubov Ivanovna, his new wife, and her daughter, Dasha's half sister Sonia. Even in the midst of her tragedy, Dasha reflects: ''What if the most terrible thing in her life had already happened? What if there could never be anything so terrible again?'' Looking inward like this gives her ''a strange sensation . . . a sensation of freedom, self-confidence, self-containment, a sensation of being ready for anything.''

Perhaps because of this experience of violence, Dasha is granted an equilibrium and an equanimity that her sisters can only dream of. Hers is a soothing, harmonious presence; indeed, her fiance will note that ''especially in her presence, there was peace, and above all, peace with himself.'' With this gift, however, comes a question of responsibility: Dasha must determine whether she is destined for a special fate (how could she not be, given such a history?) or whether her lot is simply to accept the comforts of a bourgeois family and lavish her gifts, more modestly, upon them.

Her youngest sister, Elizaveita, nicknamed Zai, is only six months old when Dasha is reclaimed by their father, and does not join the Tiagins in Paris until she is a teenager. Her mother, Dumontelle, was an actress and friend of Boiko's (it was he who raised her); her father, of course, is Tiagin. Zai and Dasha form a strong bond, and Zai alone is aware of the extent of Dasha's healing powers. Her own gifts are more mercurial and dramatic: she writes poetry, then turns to the stage (where she meets her first lover) and eventually becomes a reader of literature.

Early in the book, when traveling on the train to Paris, Zai tells a man: ''There are two kinds of people. Some are like insects. They are half transparent, you can barely see them, they tremble in the light. The others are like carpenter's nails, you can't break them with a hammer no matter how hard you try.'' She herself, she confides, is more like an insect; and the journey of her young adulthood is to try to shuck off her fear, to reach the state where she can say, as she does when in love: ''I'm happy. I'm free. I'm a human being, not a trembling insect.''

Only the middle sister, Sonia -- the child of Tiagin and Liubov Ivanovna -- is given direct voice in the novel, in the form of her diaries. Very beautiful, Sonia is also a negative vortex: she ruins Dasha's great love affair and has a hand in souring Zai's. She, who has never had friends, seeks the harmony that comes so naturally to Dasha, although she dismisses her sister as superficial. She recognizes her own ''thirst for completeness and wholeness,'' but becomes increasingly aware that this thirst cannot be quenched. ''There is no capital-T Truth,'' she announces. ''Our whole lives are spent anticipating -- and surviving -- the 'moment of horror.' '' ''Life is lonely, not death,'' she concludes; ''choosing one's end means being free and connected -- life means being disconnected.''

Sonia's sense of doom is profoundly Dostoyevskian; hers is a growing nihilism from which there can be no escape. At the very end of the novel, she even renounces literature: ''Books seemed to have a hint of dishonesty, of playing games. You couldn't just say, Ivanov put a bullet into his head, you had to surround the action with clouds that now and again sailed across the moon or a locomotive moaning in the distance or occasional dripping from the kitchen faucet. . . . But sometimes you don't feel like knowing that.''

In ''Cape of Storms,'' Berberova seems to share some of Sonia's frustration with the external mechanics of fiction. Her unflinching insistence on the three women's interiority -- and the inevitable triangulation of their metaphysical journeys -- gives the narrative a dense and uneasy aspect. It is sometimes difficult to gauge the passage of time or to sense the quotidian rhythms of the Tiagins' lives. With its occasionally turgid abstraction, ''Cape of Storms'' never achieves the moving lucidity of ''The Ladies From St. Petersburg.'' But this is also a book that glimpses great truths and asks the most vital questions. Like Dostoyevsky's novel ''The Possessed,'' it rewards the dedicated reader with a visceral ache of recognition and a renewed sense of what really matters. – Claire Messud, New York Times, January 9, 2000

Review

Originally published in 1951 as a serial in Novyi Zhurnal, . . . Berberova's epic novel is a dark Little Women, a feminine Brothers Karamazov. Three half-sisters, each of whom emigrated from the Soviet Union to France at various times to live with their father Tiagin, an ex-colonel in the Russian army, take turns describing their lives in Paris on the brink of WWII. Dasha, who as a small girl saw her mother brutally murdered by Bolsheviks, cuts short a potentially mystical destiny by marrying a dull banker. The beautiful Sonia buries herself alive with cynicism and contempt. Zai, the youngest, is the most hopeful of the bunch, confusedly waffling between passions for boyfriends, family members, poetry and acting. As explained in the book's epigraph, the title refers to the Cape of Good Hope, discovered in 1486 by Bartholomeu Dias; Dias called it the Cape of Storms because he failed to sail around it. Similarly, the sisters never manage to realize or even fully articulate their respective dreams. Berberova, herself an migr who was best known in her lifetime for her memoirs and criticism and recognized posthumously for The Ladies of St. Petersburg and The Book of Happiness, works of fiction also translated by Schwartz, excels at switching between voices and moods. Each woman's personality is artfully distinguished, the existential odes to solitude leavened with doses of pointed humor. At one point, just after Sonia decides, "I had nothing in common with this city, this country, this continent, this planet, and never would," she wonders, "Should I have a glass of wine in the corner caf ... Or should I order coffee?" Available in English for the first time, this is a work of high literary merit. – Publishers Weekly, 1999

Review

The Cape of Storms, as Nina Berberova's epigraph reminds us, is also known as the Cape of Good Hope--and in this aptly named novel of émigré Russian life, both hope and storms abound in almost equal measure. The book follows three half sisters as they pass from the terrors of revolutionary Russia to the quieter but no less perplexing environs of pre-World War II Paris. Dasha, Sonia, and Zai are neither quite Russian nor quite French. Bereft of both country and creed, they struggle to reconcile themselves with a world come loose from its moorings--and doing so means wrestling with some ancient and difficult dilemmas. What is freedom? What is harmony? Is there any such thing as absolute truth? Or, as Sonia puts it in her last, desperate hours: "Who is to blame? What is to be done?" She echoes, of course, the famous questions posed by Herzen and Chernyshevsky respectively, questions that Russian thinkers have visited and revisited ever since.

The book begins with gentle Dasha, the eldest, who preserves an unrufflable poise even after witnessing her own mother's murder. Like Vera, the heroine of Berberova's The Book of Happiness, Dasha's "dizzying equilibrium" keeps her in constant tune with the world around her. That's in contrast to beautiful, chilly Sonia, who lives only for ideas, doesn't care about the patches in her dress, and dreams obsessively of unity, harmony, and "totalitarian happiness"--all things that come naturally to Dasha, who Sonia both scorns and envies: "Well-balanced human beings! They all end up the same way: they get fat and die surrounded by grandchildren." Somewhere between the two extremes is trembling little Zai, who believes that all Russians are either insects or nails, either victims or oppressors. In Paris, she discovers that there is enough bread for everyone, writes fanciful poems about washing the kitchen floor, dabbles in acting, and tries earnestly to learn how to live as a free being.

This sort of expertly nuanced characterization almost takes the place of narrative in Cape of Storms. It's not that the novel is without external plot; on the contrary, it boasts a miraculous healing, a marriage of convenience, and a suicide, as well as several love affairs that end in disillusionment or betrayal. Yet most of these stormy events occur almost off-stage. Berberova is after something quite different than melodrama: that is, the record of three consciousnesses attempting to locate themselves in physical as well as philosophical exile, one failing, one settling for the unexamined life, and one sinking back into fear. Her style throughout is elliptical, unsentimental, simple yet fiercely personal--the sort of thing Chekhov might write if he had lived separated from everything that he loved. "All dualism is painful for me," Berberova wrote in her autobiography, The Italics Are Mine. "What is it really, this world? And what am I in it? Am I at one with it? Does it agree with me the way I am? Or could it be that only by perishing can I merge with it?" Sonia muses, and sad to say, we think we know the answer. Elegantly written and masterfully translated by Marian Schwartz, Cape of Storms is further proof that Berberova's talent was overlooked for too long. --Mary Park, Amazon.com Review

An outstanding novel about a young Russian woman's life in exile after the Russian Revolution. The Book of Happiness is one of the outstanding novels the great Russian writer Nina Berberova wrote during the years she lived in Paris, and the most autobiographical. "All Berberova's characters live raw, unfurnished lives, in poverty, on the edge of cities, with little sense of belonging — except in moments of epiphany — to their time and in life itself" (The Observer). Such a character is Vera, the protagonist of The Book of Happiness. At the novel's opening, Vera is summoned to the scene of a suicide, that of her childhood companion, Sam Adler, whose family left Russia in the early days of the revolution and whom Vera has not seen in many years. His death reduces Vera to a flood of tears and memories of the times before Sam's departure, and thoughts about how her life has gone since — her move to Paris where she lives tied to a brilliant but demanding invalid husband. Berberova spins the story with a wonderful unsentimental poignancy, making it a beautiful testament to the indestructibility of happiness.

Review

“Three Affairs to Remember”

Happiness doesn't tend to be the subject of interesting fiction. Even though most of Western literature (and philosophy) has been about the relationship between justice and happiness or knowledge and happiness or mortality and happiness, convincing descriptions of happy people are surprisingly hard to come by, or unsurprisingly banal. So a book of happiness -- let alone ''The Book of Happiness,'' Marian Schwartz's translation of Nina Berberova's wonderful novel about one woman's three love affairs -- seems no more plausible than a life of happiness. No more plausible, yet no less intriguing once we realize that the author is serious, but not solemn or sentimental, about her subject. After we read ''The Book of Happiness,'' our ordinary wish to be happy no longer seems like the hidden tyranny of our lives.

One of the many remarkable things about Berberova's novel is that its title -- like the book itself -- is not intended to be ironic. Here there is no need to take refuge in that kind of knowingness. Yet Berberova, who wrote this pellucid narrative in Paris after leaving revolutionary St. Petersburg, never assumes that the quest for happiness is, in itself, interesting. Rather, she is convinced that there is nothing duller -- nothing less congenial, in fact or fiction -- than a happy person.

Like Turgenev and Chekhov, of whom she is the rightful heir, Berberova (who died in 1993) is uncannily shrewd about romance, about its bright promise, without making her characters' real satisfactions seem trite. ''Don't you have any regard for me at all?'' the heroine's suitor asks toward the end of the book. ''Me?'' she replies. ''I adore you. Especially when you lie. You inspire me. Ask me something else.'' Read ironically -- read as dialogue in a contemporary novel -- this would sound smart and blandly sharp. But read in the spirit (and the context) of this particular book -- and the truth of this book is, above all, in its tone of passionate candor -- it is at once unmocking of people's wish to get past their naïveté and generous in the kinds of freedom it wants to offer.

Vera, the heroine, who can ''feel a happiness like suffocation,'' yearns for another kind of happiness, one that will simply make her content. She knows happiness will be real only when it ceases to be a torment, when ecstasy is not incompatible with ordinariness. ''I've completely forgotten how to envy or want,'' she says to her lover at the happy ending of the book. This is not some piece of whimsical Buddhist wisdom, some enlightened finale to her tortuous quest. Instead, it expresses a plainer truth: wanting and envying can be like skills you have no further use for. This realization is not Vera's aim; it's just what has happened to her in loving this particular man. So ''The Book of Happiness'' is a book about what can happen to people, not about the nobility (or lack of nobility) of their projects. Because Vera doesn't want to be remarkable, remarkable things can happen to her.

The novel is set in the years before and after the Russian Revolution, its movement shaped by the creeping deprivations of the young Vera's family and her exile with a dying husband in Paris. But the Revolution and her journeys -- which are made hauntingly vivid by being so obliquely described -- are merely the frame for a triptych of romantic attachments. First there is Vera's childhood love for Sam, a child prodigy violinist who, many years later, kills himself in a Paris hotel; then her marriage to Alexander, an invalid whom she nurses until his death; and, finally, her love for Karelov, a married man with whom she will have a child.

Suicide, genius, illness, exile and rapture are, of course, all staples of the great Russian fiction of the 19th century. And it is in this tradition (which is a tradition, above all, of extraordinary characters, of people with qualities) that Vera takes her place. Berberova responds to her tradition in a unique way, by making Vera a Russian heroine who is passionate without sentimentality -- or derangement. Without any obvious ideological intent, Berberova has created in Vera the anti-type of the so-called hysterical woman. And this means that the men she is drawn to can love her without needing her to provide much in the way of female mystique.

If the heroes of Dostoyevsky's novels are always men on the verge of turning into hysterical women -- or trying not to, usually by killing someone -- Berberova's male characters are unseduced by melodrama. They have a different kind of glamour: the glamour of being plain, of being straightforward in their idealism. ''I would like to be proud of my happiness,'' Karelov says to Vera. ''I don't want 'peace' or 'freedom.' I want happiness itself.'' In her intent but understated reworking of Russia's great literary themes, in her wholly successful attempt to write a contemporary version of a 19th-century novel, Berberova has seen something very clearly: that melodrama is born of shame. And what she brings to the Russian novel is the fact that she (and her main characters) are not overly impressed by shame.

So when Vera is distraught in this novel -- and ''The Book of Happiness'' is not only, perhaps inevitably, full of tears, it is also unusually interesting about the ways people cry -- her anguish has a terrible immediacy. It is not in Vera's nature to be frantic. Early in the novel, after she learns that Sam, her childhood love, has killed himself, Vera's happiness is at risk. ''But we have to keep on, we have to keep on,'' she tells herself when she awakens, terror-stricken, in the night, ''we have to keep on with this criminal, this iron love of life, for we have nothing else.'' She consoles herself by remembering that ''the flowers outside the florist's promised such a tremendous and happy life.'' Vera senses that to love life is a kind of transgression; yet it is an irresistible one. She can't ignore the florist's flowers, the unavoidable beauty of the world, and this is what makes her a new kind of heroine. For Vera, despair becomes a form of inattention.

Perhaps, then, it is not incidental that ''The Book of Happiness'' is wonderfully attentive, particularly to the odd, gratuitous ways that love affairs begin, and that the only endings it takes seriously are deaths. In this novel, people are allowed to speak ingenuously about the things that matter to them. And even though, as one of the characters remarks, ''Russia is a very sad country,'' neither sadness nor tragedy is used by the book's heroine (or its author) as a refuge from happiness. – Adam Phillips, New York Times, July 25, 1999

Review

Joy, at least by popular opinion, does not generally make for good reading. After all, as Tolstoy once quipped, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." How fitting that another Russian should prove him wrong--that happiness, when it comes to this novel's long-suffering heroine, should prove as unique, as variable, as interesting as the most melodramatic unhappiness.

Nina Berberova is perhaps one of happiness' more unlikely champions. She herself led the bittersweet life of an émigré, with all its loneliness, poverty, and loss. Her fictions--many of which are only now finding English translations--are beautifully, inventively written, if somewhat chilly to the touch. What a pleasure, then, to find a heroine as brimming with life as Vera of The Book of Happiness. Unsentimental, possessed of a "dizzying equilibrium," Vera is a breath of fresh air for those used to the feverish, pawnbroker-murdering brand of Russian protagonist. Her story is told in three parts, each of which corresponds to a love of her life. In the first, the suicide of her oldest friend sends Vera spinning through memories of her idyllic childhood; in the second, she relives her marriage to a tyrannical invalid and their emigration to Paris. In the third--well, suffice it to say there's a happy ending. Very happy, and also good reading.

Berberova writes with both great feeling and great restraint. Take, for instance, the invalid's description of falling in love: "Just imagine someone who is dying of life. On his forehead is ice, on his chest a bag of oxygen, his hand in someone's dear hand. And here it all is, in you: the ice, the oxygen, and the hand." His love is the opposite of Vera's: she loves not for hysterical transports, but for the simplest and most natural of reasons. What she wants, she decides is "not 'peace' or 'freedom' but happiness, the most genuine and impossible happiness"--a state of mind as difficult to find on the page as it is in real life. In this elegant translation by Marian Schwartz, Berberova comes as close as humanly possible to reproducing the sensation of joy. -- Mary Park, Amazon.com Review

Review

Russian émigré writer Berberova, who died in 1993, is known primarily for her memoirs and her criticism. Marian Schwartz, the translator of this and previous works, helps to round out the picture with this novel, giving voice to Berberova's finely tuned, tersely evocative fiction. The heroine, Vera, is much like Berberova describes herself in her autobiography: a woman with a cool head in the hothouse world of Russian émigrés' Europe in the 1920s. Immediately signaling the ironic title, the narrative begins with a suicide. Sam Adler, once a musical prodigy, shoots himself in a hotel room in Paris. A hotel clerk calls Vera, to whom he has left a note: "Life tricked me... and I'm surrendering with honor before it's too late." By this Lubitsch-like conceit we then move wholly into Vera's existence. Sam is her childhood friend, and his death brings up memories of prerevolutionary St. Petersburg. Berberova vividly evokes the flight of the upper classes when the revolution strikes; how the crammed opulence of those Petersburg mansions blocks the exits. Vera, who is similarly privileged, stays, while Sam's family emigrates to America. There, he fails to find the successful career he expected; years later, he returns to Paris to die. Meanwhile, Vera meets the sickly but charismatic Alexander Albertovich, who takes her from the Soviet Union to Paris. Albertovich is reminiscent of Berberova's real-life lover, Khodasaevich. He drowns Vera's youth in his own lingering death, so that when he dies, Vera feels released. She travels to Nice and embarks on love affairs, one of which sends her fleeing back to Paris with her ex-lover and his ex-wife on her heels. Berberova makes Vera's inner life so opaque that the reasons why Vera seems repeatedly to define herself in terms of sickly men remains enigmatic. Yet this book is an important addition to émigré literature, which, as we are discovering, is much more than just Nabokov. – Publishers Weekly, April 1999

Review

As Berberova demonstrates in this deftly nuanced novel, passive Russian happiness has at least two virtues that its more active American cousin lacks. Memory must embrace the past in its entirely, indiscriminately, for otherwise a person might fail to note the various threads patterning former happiness. Even more important, those desiring happiness must understand each moment to be pregnant with the possibility of its arrival. As limpidly preserved by Marian Schwartz's translation, Berberova's is a prose of small gestures, pregnant moments, and memories polished bright as sea pebbles by the constant tumbling of thought. Thus the real beauty of Berberova's sweet watercolor of a novel emerges only at the book's end. – The Washington Post

A deftly nuanced novel. -- Washington Post Book World

Review

In the past decade, American readers have with the publication of "The Ladies from St. Petersburg," been graced with her fiction (translated with precision and elegance by Marian Schwartz). Berberova is a wondrous writer. A master of the long short story, she has been compared with Turgenev and Chekhov. And properly so--her lyricism, emotional wisdom and understatement bring even her shorter stories to full, novelistic life. Because many of her characters are deracinated women of sophistication and gentility, she has also been compared to Jean Rhys. Berberova's greatest asset is her control, the balance she achieves between restraint and enthusiasm. She writes about the harsh Russian winters with a delicacy that is chilling. She writes about the joy and ambitiousness of lucky youth as it should be written about--ecstatically. And she writes about sex with an uncommon combination of sensitivity, knowingness, and courage. -- Boston Book Review, April 1999

Review

Berberova evokes Czarist Russia's feckless exiles with so deft a touch, she seems to be writing memoirs of other selves whose loss she only half regrets. Yet while their impression remains, she evokes a wistfulness as charming as it is ambivalent. – Michael Pinker, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 2000

[A] memorable novel that will certainly enhance the posthumous reputation of Nina Berberova. Bryan Aubrey, Magill’s Literary Annual 2000

Berberova's self-possession -- even her prose style has the honed elegance of finely tempered steel and taut lineage -- is admirable. -- Confrontation, Winter/Spring 2000