Winner, 2009 AATSEEL Award for Best Translation into English

White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov’s semi-autobiographical first novel, revolves around a Ukrainian family in their home city of Kiev in 1918. Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka Turbin, adult siblings who have just lost their mother, find themselves plunged into the chaotic civil war that erupted in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In the context of this family’s saga, Bulgakov recreates not only the moment-to-moment experience of battles, but also the long pauses that come before and after. He confronts the reader with the cruelty and violence that overtakes people and events, yet holds up for contrast individual acts of heroism and humanity.

Review

In the course of their life in translation, the best novels shed their skin more than once. The time for Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard has been long overdue. Marian Schwartz’s excellent translation of Bulgakov’s early novel is both timely and elegant, preserving the shape, texture, and richness of the original text. . .

Schwartz sustains careful attention to detail throughout the whole of the translation project. She faithfully reproduces the bewildering kaleidoscope of detail that makes White Guard both difficult and intriguing, capturing the ornamental imagery, tone, pacing and phrasing of the original. Marian Schwartz’s new translation of White Guard treats Bulgakov’s work honorably and performs a great service to Bulgakov’s present and future readers. — Sidney Eric Dement, University of Kansas

For the full review, see Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 53, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 680-681.

White on Black
By Ruben Gallego
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Harcourt, 2006; paperback ed., 2007

Winner of the Soeurette Diehl Frasier Translation Award, Texas Institute of Letters, 2007

This is an extraordinary personal testament, the story of one boy's triumph in the face of impossible obstacles. Born with cerebral palsy in Moscow, Ruben Gallego was hidden away in Soviet state institutions by his maternal grandfather, the secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party in the 1960s. His was a boyhood spent in orphanages, hospitals, and old-age homes, a life of emotional deprivation and loss of human dignity. And yet, there is no self-pity here, no bitterness, only an unfailing regard for the truth. Gallego's story is one of neglect and mistreatment but also of shared small pleasures, of courage, of the power of the human will, and of a child's growing fascination with books and the worlds he finds in them. Winner of the 2003 Russian Booker Prize, White on Black is "one of those rare books one can call revolutionary" (Corriere della Sera, January 8, 2006).

Review

Mr. Gallego's little book is deeply moving, his triumph a joy to read about. -- Steve Goode, Washington Times, January 8, 2006

Review

Born with cerebral palsy in 1960s Russia, Gallego spent his childhood in appallingly negligent Soviet institutions where nurses “demanded only one thing of me: that I ask for as little help as possible.” In this series of vignettes, he recalls an abusive caretaker and his first taste of pineapple with the same unaffected prose and remarkable restraint. Of his grandfather the Communist Party general secretary who abandoned him in an orphanage Gallego simply writes, “I’ll never understand him.” While abrupt shifts from first to third person and past to present are sometimes jarring, Gallego has produced a harrowing and graceful memoir that consistently emphasizes empowerment and endurance over self-pity. -- Hannah Tucker, Entertainment Weekly, January 13, 2006

Review

To be a crippled orphan anywhere is a sad thing; worst, undoubtedly, in the Third World, but no picnic in the Soviet Union. Gallego, a brilliant boy born with cerebral palsy, with hands and feet so twisted that though he could crawl he could use only his left index finger, was abandoned to state institutions by his grandfather in the 1960s. That he survived this "cruel and terrible" childhood is a tribute to a remarkably strong will. The most atrocious fact of many that readers learn is that eventually, usually at age 15, institutionalized boys, Gallego included, were transferred from children's wards to the "old folks' home," where they lay in their own urine until they died; in one month, seven out of eight perished. Amazingly, Gallego lived to marry, have children and write this extraordinary book of "stories," spare, elliptical, often fierce vignettes centered around remembered figures and events: "a bite of lard, a salami sandwich, a handful of figs, a blue sky, a couple of books, and a kind word." These glimpses of adversity and triumph are quirky, sometimes appalling, often funny and touching without being sentimental. The book won the 2003 Russian Booker Prize and should receive similar acclaim here. -- Publishers Weekly, January 2006

Review

In the Soviet Union, according to its 1936 Constitution, unemployment did not officially exist: "Work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen according to the principle, 'He who does not work shall not eat.' " The new Soviet man was to be broad of chest and square of jaw, tireless in his dedication to the country's welfare. Set him a work quota, and he'd double it. Double his quota, and he'd flex his muscles and double it again.

Ruben Gallego could use only two of his fingers. Born in 1968 with cerebral palsy and abandoned to the Soviet orphanage system, he got around, for lack of a wheelchair, by pulling himself along the floor, as does the main character bearing his name in the jarring opening vignette of White on Black. "I was a better student than anyone," the narrator makes a point of mentioning. Unfortunately, his brainpower doesn't mean much to the caretakers who carry him to the toilet. "You say he's smart," one of them observes, "but he can't walk!"

White on Black captures a grim side of the Soviet workers' paradise: the thousands of children classified as physically or mentally disabled and locked away from public view. Winner of the 2003 Russian Booker Prize for best novel, this semi-fictionalized memoir now appears in Marian Schwartz's faithful translation. "My heroes are collective images from the endless kaleidoscope of my endless children's homes," Gallego asserts at the start. "What I write, though, is the truth." Paradoxically, under communism, truth was a realm unofficially ceded to writers of fiction, since facts were so often hedged or bent by politics. In White on Black, fiction similarly provides a truth-telling veneer to Gallego's straightforward if sometimes too convenient arrangement of facts -- a way of getting at the essential reality.

That reality is one that few others could describe firsthand. The grandson of a leader of the Spanish Communist Party, Gallego was shut away in the Soviet orphanage system at the age of 1 for a variety of complicated reasons having to do with his grandfather's political career. His mother, then a student in Moscow, was told her sickly son had died. Gallego spent his youth moving through a blur of children's and old-age homes. It was only thanks to perestroika that he managed to break free, marry twice, father two children and eventually, after discovering the truth about his origins, reunite with his mother in the West.

The mini-tales that make up White on Black, which Gallego typed with his left index finger, brutally expose the reality the Soviet government did not want its people to see -- a reality that persists despite some improvements, with hundreds of thousands of orphaned or abandoned children living under circumstances that Human Rights Watch, in 1998, called "shocking" for their "levels of cruelty and neglect."

Escaping -- indeed, surviving -- the closed institutions in which Gallego grew up often depended on the slim likelihood of mastering a practical trade. Food, heat and kind words were pitifully rare, and public humiliation was a common disciplinary tactic. "Poor child, better you'd died," one caretaker says. "You'd have spared yourself the suffering, and us." Yet even such callousness was less painful, on balance, than tales of a brave new world meant for everyone but him: "They told stories about the stars and continents, but they wouldn't let me go past the gate of the children's home."

Physical disability was positively portrayed in official rhetoric only when overcome, raised to the level of national myth in the case of Pavel Korchagin, the hero of Nikolai Ostrovsky's autobiographical novel How the Steel Was Tempered, who exchanges his gun for a pen after blindness and paralysis strike. When Korchagin loses his right eye, he declares: "Better to go blind in the left one; how will I shoot now?" Looking to Ostrovsky and Korchagin as models, Gallego devotes some of the more powerful sketches to his narrator's attempts to eat as little as possible, thereby making it easier for his caretakers to carry him around.

Generally, though, the dogma seems lost on him. In the most piercing and starkly ironic incident, the narrator recalls falling in love with the idea of America after being told that the capitalists there routinely have their handicapped children killed. "I want the injection, the fatal injection," he says passionately. "I want to go to America." To him, the Soviet myth is little more than a hollow and oppressive pretense of compassion. Gallego unmasks that charade with intelligence and authority, exposing along with it any cult of heroism that thrives on suppressing human weakness. "I'm a hero," he states. "If you don't have hands or feet, you're either a hero or dead." White on Black demonstrates in no uncertain terms that this hero is alive and kicking. -- Rebecca Reich, The Washington Post, 2006

Review

In 1968, Ignacio Gallego, the patriarch of the Spanish Community Party, severed ties with a willful daughter, who had just given birth to a toddler with cerebral palsy in Moscow. The Kremlin covered for Gallego's callousness and informed his daughter that the boy, who was being held in a special hospital, had died.

This illustrious, troubled pedigree and diplomatic intrigue are nowhere to be found in that boy's memoir of having grown up, amid inconceivable humiliation and want, in a succession of Soviet orphanages and old-age homes where he was anonymously registered after his official "death." Gallego's very first line defiantly telegraphs that he would rather do without special treatment or easy sympathy: "I'm a hero. It's easy to be a hero. If you don't have hands or feet, you're either a hero or dead."

The rest of this blistering memoir proceeds with equally clear-eyed reflections on growing up handicapped in the Soviet Union, a place where disability was viewed with embarrassment and disdain. Gallego does not wish for sainthood, only for as much right to coarseness as to virtue. Discussing Monsieur Coquenard, a character in a sequel to The Three Musketeers who dies, leaving his wife and fortune to the lovable Porthos, Gallego writes: "Monsieur Coquenard did not arouse my sympathy . . . If that pathetic old man had had the strength and smarts to sprinkle poison into Porthos's wine, I would've been on his side."

Gallego is above self-pity, but not above rage, and a bitterness that happily makes room for humor: "In Russia, there's a custom of honoring the dead by sharing food . . . The more unfortunate the person fed, the more you've pleased the deceased. But where was one to find them, the unfortunates, in the most fortunate country in the world?" The Soviet Union kept the disabled out of public view in understaffed homes short on even the most basic equipment. Young Ruben crawls to the bathroom because there are no wheelchairs.

But there are drinking parties with other boys in the home, an occasional chocolate, nighttime visions on the ceiling. Gallego conveys these experiences without any care for antecedent or historical, geographical, or logistical detail. Wives — Gallego seems to have married twice — appear in later years without any introduction; the narrator leaps from youth to adulthood without warning; the procession of homes where Gallego found himself receive no elaboration beyond generic references. Gallego's memoir is a brutal impressionist painting — his abstract and free-associative prose aims above all to convey the blur of pain and somehow persisting hope of which his life consisted in the two decades he spent in the system.

In the Russian original, the contextless prose universalized Gallego's experiences without abandoning too many readers: those who had lived in Soviet times knew the code. In this way, a phrase like "it was explained to me that my mama was a black-assed bitch" needed no explication for most because "black-assed" was a common epithet for darker people, whether from the Caucasus, or, like Gallego, from southern Europe. When a pineapple appears in a home and Gallego is the only ward that takes to it, a nurse exclaims, "I'll bet his papa grew up on these pineapples." In the Soviet imagination, African blacks — dark-skinned Gallego's presumed parentage to the unknowing attendants — swung from trees and ate fruit.

One wonders if the transcontinental trip is too far for all this cultural shorthand. Marian Schwartz's lucent translation preserves Gallego's unique mix of fury and bittersweet laughter — one part perennial child, one part old man, an uncanny facsimile of the orphanages and old-age homes where he lived — and she admirably resists the impulse to clarify Gallego, either in the text or with footnotes. It's a rare, bold case of valuing craft above sales, and even above readers. -- Boris Fishman, Words Without Borders

Review

Ruben Gallego was born in Moscow in 1968 without hands or feet. He was packed off to an orphanage, then later to an old people's home, where he was left to die. Somehow he survived. White on Black is his story. It won the Russian Booker Prize in 2003.

Nothing typified the Soviet Union so much as its treatment of the handicapped. Laziness, indifference and bureaucratic stupidity achieved what in Nazi Germany was the result of deliberate policy. Most of Gallego's fellow "non-ambulants" eventually perished of starvation and neglect, but not before enduring endless speeches "about the ultimate victory of communism, about our happy childhood". However, as elsewhere in Russia, the cruelty of the system was occasionally softened by individual kindnesses. Gallego fondly remembers some of his nurses or nyanyas, kind-hearted peasant women who gave him sweets and told him the truth, even if it was only that he was better off dead.

To survive such an upbringing, you had to be tough. Gallego recalls with envy how the boys would drink chifir, a vile amphetamine-like concentrate of black tea, and pump iron with their extant limbs. He himself was too crippled to take part in these feats, so consoled himself with reading. He read about the Vikings and the kamikazes, about Cyrano de Bergerac and Pavka Korchagin. Literature became his weapon. "Slowly pressing the computer keys, I set down letter after letter. I'm painstakingly forging my own bayonet - my book." But literature, in the end, was no substitute for physical prowess. Gallego fondly recalls a drunken soldier mistaking him for a veteran of the Afghan war and calling him "brother". For a moment, he was an equal. It is a sad scene.

A book like this could never have been written by a product of the English care system. Gallego is hard and angry, but mercifully free of "issues". He does not rant about the system, he does not cut himself with knives, he is not paranoid or neurotic. In short, he has dignity. He is a human being, not a "problem case". Why is this? Is it because he never enjoyed the benefits of counselling, with its endless rehashing of grievances? Or is it because he always knew that if he did not help himself, no one else would help him? "I am a hero," he says. "If you don't have hands or feet, you're either a hero or dead." Horrible though Gallego's upbringing was, it left intact something that our far softer system of care succeeds in destroying.

However, Gallego offers no com- fort to devotees of Russian backwardness. His book concludes with a paean to America, with its electronic wheelchairs, elevators and ramps. Even McDonald's gets a friendly mention for meeting "world standards for barrier-free access". Gallego loves America for those very qualities that his fellow countrymen affect to despise. "Here everything is bought and sold. A terrible, cruel country. You can't count on compassion. But I had my fill of compassion back in Russia. I'm fine with ordinary business." The US has nothing to compare with the saintliness of Gallego's nyanyas, but neither does it have the conditions that make such saintliness necessary.

White on Black belongs to a distinctively Russian genre, with no exact equivalent in the west. It is not reportage, but neither is it fiction. Perhaps the best word for it would be "witness". It is divided up into a series of short stories, each recounting a single incident. These stories make no claim to historical truth. Their target is essential truth - pravda. They are icons of suffering and resilience, cruelty and kindness. This has nothing to do with "literature" in the western sense, with its omnivorous curiosity and surface polish, but it has a beauty of its own. Lovers of the later Tolstoy and of Solzhenitsyn will appreciate its value. – Edward Skidelsky, New Statesman, February 6, 2006

Review

His darkly, matter-of-factly Homeric, heroic shout of triumph is astonishing. -- Iain Finlayson, The Times

Review

Reticence about politics is another source of the book's power. Gallego suffered more than most from Soviet squalor and lies, but this is indirectly conveyed, in often burlesque episodes. (...) If the entire book is an allegory of Communism, it is one that is unforced, and maybe unconscious. The Soviet Union emerges as a country in which good people existed, though most were morally disabled, metaphorically without arms or legs. Yet the tone is not one of despair, and the individual can survive against the odds." - George Walden, Times Literary Supplement

Advance praise for A Hero of Our Time:

It's high time an up-to-date and idiomatic version of A Hero of Our Time was made available to American readers. Marian Schwartz's translation of Lermontov's classic adventure novel captures all the suppleness and wit of Lermontov's prose, the fine texture of his descriptions and the galloping rhythm of his narrative passages. This is a fine addition to the Modern Library. -- Michael Scammell

Military life in the Caucasus, bandits, duels, romance--at the hands of a passionate adventurer with “a restless imagination, an insatiable heart.” That is Pechorin, and also Lermontov. If you have a personal all-time bestseller list, make room for A Hero of our Time. -- Alan Furst

In Russia Mikhail Lermontov is considered one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century. Marian Schwartz's compelling translation shows us why. -- Peter Constantine

Review

Before James Dean — or even Colin Farrell — there was Pechorin, the bad boy hero of Lermontov's famous novella, which has been appropriately modernized by Marian Schwartz, one of our greatest Russian translators. -- Boldtype, October 2004

A classic of Soviet literature, Envy is a humorous look at the individual’s struggle with an industrialized society. Marian Schwartz’s new English translation captures the energy and strangeness of this Russian masterpiece.

A tour-de-force that has been compared to the best of Nabokov and Bulgakov, Olesha’s effervescent novella brings together cutting social satire, slapstick humor, and a wild visionary streak. Ivan Babichev is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of the food industry who intends to revolutionize modern life with mass-produced sausage. Andrei Kavalerov is a loser and a liar. Finding him drunk in the gutter, Babichev gave him a bed for the night and a job as a gofer, but that doesn’t mean he’s grateful. To the contrary. Griping, sulking, groveling, always abject, Kavalerov despises everything Babichev believes in, even if he envies him his every breath.

Producer and sponger, insider and outcast, master and man, fight back in forth in the pages of Olesha’s anarchic comedy. It is a contest of will and passion in which nothing is sure except, perhaps, the incorrigible nature of the human heart.

Podcast

Listen to an interview with the translator about this book on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show, in his "Underappreciated" series.

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

Selected by The New York Times as one of the Best Books of 1998, now available as a ND paperbook. Writing with a resonating clarity, unsentimental yet full of human sympathy., Nina Berberova stands as one of the treasures of twentieth century literature and the continuance of the great Russian tradition.The Ladies from St. Petersburg contains three novellas which chronologically paint a picture of the dawn of the Russian revolution, the flight from its turmoil, and the plight of an exile in a new and foreign place all of which Berberova knew from her own personal experience. In the title story the protagonists are taking a vacation, unaware that their lives are about to be irrevocably changed. In "Zoya Andreyevna," an elegant, privileged woman, in headlong flight, falls ill among unfriendly strangers who resent her wealth and position even though she does not flaunt it. In "The Big City," an emigrant lands in a surreal New York, a place that is not yet, and may never be, his home.

Review

“To Russia, Without Love”

The title novella in this slender collection ends with two words: “Oh, Russia!” It takes only 45 pages to get to this sigh, an expedited journey that would normally take despairing Russian writers (Gogol, for example) hundreds more. For this we may credit the lucidity of Nina Berberova's prose and the deftness of her characterizations, qualities that are evident throughout her work.

Berberova, who was born in St. Petersburg in 1901 and fled Russia in 1922, is best known in America for her autobiography, “The Italics Are Mine” (1969). She went on to have three volumes of her fiction published in English (much more of her work has appeared in French) before she died in 1993, a professor emeritus at Princeton University. “The Ladies from St. Petersburg” is the fourth book of her work to be translated.

Closely similar in theme and story line, two of these three novellas were first published in Paris in 1927. In each, a well-to-do Russian woman on the run from revolutionary turmoil falls ill among unsympathetic countrymen. Berberova's characters prove themselves to be vain and small-minded, even selfish and cruel. “Oh, Russia!” is pronounced dry-eyed. The author never romanticizes her homeland.

The distinguishing virtue of Berberova's work is the manipulation of visual images. Born two years after Vladimir Nabokov, whom she befriended in Paris, Berberova shares Nabokov's sensitive attention to the protean qualities of color and shadow. Thus she writes of a sunset, as experienced by a man in an uncurtained apartment: “The red needle of a distant skyscraper was reflected in the sink, and a blue flame fell on the face of my watch. Something orange played with the door lock, and the ceiling suddenly looked as if it had been sliced by a long ray. Something flickered in the corner. I didn't guess right away that these were the buttons on my jacket, which I had dropped on the chair.”

In this exquisite passage (which goes on, to the reader's deepening pleasure), Berberova was clearly influenced by Andrei Bely. The weird, rich imagery of Bely's 1913 novel, “Petersburg,” inspired a generation of Russian poets and writers who would be unable to act upon that inspiration in their own country. In Berberova's work, as in Bely's and Nabokov's, the physical world melts against the screen of vision; stationary objects suddenly make use of the verbs of motion. In the title story, Berberova works this magic upon the flight of crows above the countryside:

“Rooks landed on the cart occasionally and then sketched something incomprehensible and instantly forgotten across the puffy sky. From time to time the blunt thatched roofs of huts poked up near the distant line of the horizon. Solitary birches by the sides of the road curled up against the weak, damp wind.”

The third novella in this collection, “The Big City,” was written in 1952 and demonstrates the growth of abstraction and absurdity in Berberova's fiction. It too is about flight and exile, but it's set in an unnamed city, with an unnamed immigrant who takes up residence on the top floor of a strange, anonymous building: “The unfamiliar mirage all around me seemed to share nothing whatever in common with my entire life and destiny so far.”

The narrator is proved wrong in this assumption, though not before embarking on a surreal adventure — in search of turpentine with which to clean his paint-spattered trousers. He eventually makes a friend in a neighboring apartment, and through his friend's mysterious binoculars sees his own past lighted in the windows of the city's other skyscrapers; he has discovered “that every person brings whatever he can to this big city.” The unnamed city, says the story's translator, Marian Schwartz, is indisputably New York. Berberova's view of it ends not with a lament but with an epiphany: the exile has found a home.

Schwartz, Berberova's longtime friend and translator, has written an affecting introduction to this volume, which she has translated with care and a suitable transparency. “The Ladies from St. Petersburg” is a very slight book, but it should add to readers' respect for Berberova and, as Schwartz puts it, for “the force of her art, her intellect and her will.” – Ken Kalfus, New York Times, November 1, 1998

Review

Berberova wrote within the nineteenth-century literary tradition....Her language is classical and lyrical. Her images, such as the description of the leaking coffin in The Ladies from St. Petersburg, are unforgettable....Common to all three main characters is a sense of rootlessness and a longing for stability. Berberova depicts their suffering with lyrical intensity. -- Bonnie Marshall, World Literature Today

Review

The three novellas in this slim but potent collection explore the psychic price of immigration and the rigors of enduring hardship alone. Russian émigré Berberova (1901-1993) first moved to France in the 1920s, then settled in the U.S. in the 1950s, where she taught at Princeton University. The first two tales, written in 1927, recall Russia's tumultuous pre-Revolutionary period. In the title story--the most powerful of the three--a young woman is left to make her mother's funeral arrangements at an inn deep in the country. When she returns many years later, the new government has erased all evidence of the entire village. Berberova's matter-of-fact tone and descriptions of the stark surroundings create a dark current of tension. The title character of "Zoya Andreyevna" struggles with her decision to live in a rooming house in an unknown city. As a middle-class woman who has divorced her husband, apparently for political reasons, she is scorned by her somewhat less-respectable roommates. In the experimental "The Big City," which was written shortly after Berberova's arrival in New York, as the narrator explores his new, monstrous apartment building, he is presented with glimpses of this country's opportunities, literally, with every door he opens and every window he peers through. Berberova describes the loneliness of the immigrant without sentimentality; once thrown into this transitional world, her characters resign themselves to the fight to stay alive. Schwartz's fine translation should help acquaint a larger audience with this writer, best known for her earlier works about life in Paris, including The Accompanist (which was turned into a film), The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels and her biography, Aleksandr Blok: A Life. – Publishers Weekly, October, 1998

Review

An elegant voice from the past speaks lucidly in three fine long stories, all written decades ago by the late expatriate Russian author (1901-93) of The Accompanist (1988), The Tattered Cloak (1991), and many other works of fiction (most as yet untranslated into English). Berberova lived through the 1917 Revolution, then emigrated to Paris, and later (in 1950) to the U.S., where she would become a respected professor at Princeton. Her own experiences are perhaps most clearly reflected in the last of this volume's stories, 'The Big City' (1952), which renders a Russian émigré's uneasy accommodation to his huge New York City apartment building as a hallucinatory clash of bizarre images, mingled with recurring memories of a dangerous childhood accident. The earlier 'Zoya Andreyevna' (1927) records the emotional vacillations of an 'independent' Russian woman who has left her husband, then lost her lover to the army, as she suffers the contempt of fellow boarders in a rundown rooming house. The story is rather marred by too much historical summary (its period is immediately pre-revolutionary) and needless statement of its themes; still, the manner in which Zoya Andreyevna's loneliness and self-consciousness build to the brink of dementia is very nearly Chekhovian. Better still is the superb title piece, in which a mother's and daughter's vacation on the eve of the Revolution is shattered by the former's sudden death and unavoidable burial far from home. Berberova's point is this sheltered family's slowness to comprehend the reality of the changes shaking their country — a point vividly underscored when the daughter, Margarita, returning years later (with her own young daughter) to reclaim her mother's body, finds in place of the rustic town she had remembered a landscape altered beyond recognition, and her mother's grave indistinguishable from many equally anonymous others. Moving and memorable stories, beautifully translated by Marian Schwartz. Here's hoping she's at work on more of Berberova's fiction. – Kirkus Review

Three poignant glimpses into a not-very-far past era, an unadorned and yet elegant hell. - – Marilis Hornidge, Courier-Gazette

A New York Times Notable Book of 1991

The greatest collection by one of the great Russian writers is now back in print. First published in Europe in the 1930s and '40s, these searing, evocative stories by the late émigré writer Nina Berberova (1901-1993) are portraits of the lives of Russian exiles in Paris on the eve of World War II. The protagonists range from housekeepers and waiters to shabby-genteel aristocrats and intellectuals — but all are united in a haunting displacement from their pasts, and all share a troubling uncertainty about the future.

A splendid, tragically beautiful writer capable of drawing unforgettable characters ... sublime. -- Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1991

First rate.... These stories are very much of their time, but the years haven't tarnished them... -- Newsweek, July 15, 1991

Haunting ... as graceful and subtle as Chekhov. -- Anne Tyler, New Republic

Review

"Their Corsets Were Stuffed with Bank Notes"

The literature of exile is the most vivid testimony to the distresses of this century. It is the fiction of the dispossessed, the legacy of the shadow lives that trail in the wake of history. One writer who has charted this path is Nina Berberova, an 89-year-old Russian émigré who has lived in the United States since 1950. Her fiction, originally published in Europe from the late 1930's to the 1950's, has recently been reissued in France and Britain; now, in a graceful translation by Marian Schwartz, more of it is appearing in America.

Five of the six novellas or long stories — call them what you will — in "The Tattered Cloak" are brilliantly impressionistic evocations of the incestuous, impoverished and courageous life of the Russian enclave in Paris in the period before and during World War II. The final story, "In Memory of Schliemann," is a surreal and futuristic allegory set, apparently, in postwar America. It does not come off, and is so different in style and effect from the earlier work that one is bound to see Nina Berberova as one of those strange and miraculous writers who are, in a sense, the creation of the events to which they bear witness. Her gift is to reflect circumstance.

There is neither self-indulgence nor sentiment in her fiction. The people of whom she writes — the former White Russian officers eking out an existence as waiters or warehousemen, the female servants with childhood memories of St. Petersburg and Moscow — are presented not as victims but as ordinary, fallible human beings. Several of them are positively disagreeable. The protagonist of "Astashev in Paris," for example, is a parasitic young man who preys emotionally on both his mother and his stepmother, flitting between them as between wife and mistress. He makes a living selling life insurance, a profession that provides a deft and inspired satire on these ruined lives: "What I want is someone to insure me against life," exclaims a potential client. The story is a fine study of heartlessness, its impact stemming from the detached narration in which people are left to condemn themselves by words and actions, with just the occasional sparkling phrase to nail a personality (Astashev "jiggling the pale fat of his baby cheeks as he walked").

Tania, of "The Waiter and the Slut," is also pretty unprepossessing. But here the presentation of selfishness and unscrupulousness is underpinned by a sense of stoical tenacity. The reader is left feeling revulsion, but also a grudging admiration. As a young woman, Tania ruins her sister's life by stealing her fiancé. Her own ensuing history is one of drift and disillusion as her marriage disintegrates; without talent or vocation, she exists by attaching herself to men until at last she is washed up in a Paris garret, all her resources gone, including youth and good looks. She too is a parasite; but what commands our respect is her inextinguishable will to survive.

On the brink of destitution, Tania hovers between two plans: spending her last francs on a gun with which to commit suicide or getting her hair done, dressing up and going out to a good restaurant. She chooses the second, of course, and falls in not, as she had hoped, with a rich protector but with a seedy old waiter, a fellow exile. The resolution of the story doesn't quite live up to its promise, but it offers an emotive picture of the tarnished lives of dispossessed young women, trailing around Europe in the years between the two world wars, initially with their corsets stuffed with bank notes, ending up as nursemaids and laundresses, seeking comfort in the claustrophobic friendships that are all that is left to them of their privileged past.

The choice of title story in a collection is always a quirky editorial matter. In this instance, "The Tattered Cloak" seems to me a comparatively unsuccessful offering — a rambling tale that tries to cover too great a range both in time and in space and ends up demonstrating Nina Berberova's weakness, which is a failure to come to grips with fictional structure. But, that being said, there are riches once again in the story's presentation of émigré life, done with a marriage of humor and matter-of-fact depiction of dire circumstances that perfectly reflects the attitudes of the characters.

The book opens with a brief oddity, "The Resurrection of Mozart," a sort of ghost story in which a mysterious figure — "I'm not a soldier, I'm a civilian. A musician" — billets himself with a Russian family in a country village near Paris in June of 1940, as the whole landscape teems with refugees fleeing the approaching Germans. It is a strangely opaque piece, one that does not entirely work, and yet as haunting as anything in this remarkable collection. It nicely sets the scene, sharpening the reader's response to this writer whose talent has so clearly fed upon the malevolence of fate. -- Penelope Lively, New York Times, June 21, 1991

Review

"A Russian Émigré World of Dreams and Griefs"

The six short "novels" — or longish short stories — in this dazzling collection by Nina Berberova were first published during the 1930's and 40's in Europe. Born in St. Petersburg in 1901, Ms. Berberova had initially welcomed the Revolution, but in 1922, as the persecution of intellectuals accelerated, she fled to Paris with her lover, the poet Vladislav Khodassevitch. There, and in Berlin, she became part of the community of Russian émigrés, struggling to invent new lives for themselves far from home.

Her stories conjure up that émigré world with such artistry and emotional precision that the reader can only marvel that it took so long for her works to be made available in America, and feel gratitude for their current publication.

Whether they are fading courtesans, dronelike clerks or mousy servants, the people in Ms. Berberova's stories all divide their lives into an after and a before: their exile marks a watershed from which they measure their subsequent lives. Some of them will experience a second watershed as well, in the form of World War II, which will undermine their few remaining shreds of security and leave them with an even greater sense of dislocation.

Indeed, the characters in "The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories" find themselves unable to escape the past, either nostalgically recalling their youthful hopes and dreams, or dwelling sadly upon lost opportunities and missed connections. In "The Resurrection of Mozart," a group of expatriates in wartime France reminisce about happier days as they fearfully await the German advance on Paris. In the title story, a laundress recalls her childhood in Russia with her beloved sister, who seemingly escaped her family's emotionally attenuated existence by marrying an ambitious poet. And in "The Black Pestilence," a middle-aged clerk, who continues to mourn the death of his beloved wife, moves from Russia to Paris to New York to Chicago, constantly running away from the possibility of any further romantic involvements.

Cut off from their families and hard-pressed to make enough money to pay the rent, these people inhabit a dull, gray world of diminished expectations. Though some of them still "search for grandeur," still thirst "for wisdom, love and truth," they find no way of reconciling their dreams with the reality of their shabby surroundings. Bit by bit, they relinquish their hopes of romance and success, and in time, many of them also forfeit their dignity and their pride.

In "The Waiter and the Slut," Tania, the daughter of a St. Petersburg bureaucrat, winds up in Paris, where her husband dies in an insane asylum and she finds herself alone and penniless. It's not long before she is reduced — like a Jean Rhys heroine — to subsisting on meals paid for by male admirers. As she grows older, her admirers, too, grow seedier and more pathetic, and she soon finds herself trapped in a desperate romance with a waiter — a romance that will culminate, tragically, in a terrible act of violence.

In fact this volume is filled with melodramatic events: A self-absorbed cad carelessly seduces a vulnerable spinster, who proceeds to kill herself in shame; an unhappy woman fantasizes about stealing her sister's husband; another despairing woman tries to stage the murder of her lover, in emulation of the shocking stories she's read in the local tabloids. Though operatic in intensity, these events are related with the delicacy of a string quartet, and they never feel implausible or extreme; rather, they feel like the inevitable outcome of that horrible spiral of emotions that turns hope into disappointment, expectancy into loss.

"Only we ourselves changed," says one character. "Father's sister Varvara, who had sent for us and who seemed at first a fresh, 40-year-old woman who never lacked either work or a lover, in those years became an old woman, still doing daywork, going to other people's kitchens to wash dishes or to mop floors. Her friends still came by in the evenings as they always had, but her lieutenants and captains were not as bold or assiduously groomed and pomaded as they had once been. No, they were old and meek, like Varvara herself, and they had the same big rough worker's hands."

Like Chekhov, Ms. Berberova has that rare ability to talk about ordinary people's private dreams and griefs in simple, direct language that allows the reader nearly complete access to their hearts. At once objective and sympathetic, she sees the widening gaps that time — several decades or a single moment — can open up between a character's vision of himself and the facts of his day-to-day life; and she traces that process of disillusionment with such candor and compassion that the reader comes away with an understanding of both her people's small, petty desires and their larger yearnings after meaning and transcendence.

Long overdue in America, this collection of stories deserves a wide and appreciative audience, while Ms. Berberova herself deserves recognition as one of the most captivating Russian writers alive today. -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, 1991

Review

"Cautionary Tales"

In 1969 Nina Berberova published the American translation of her autobiography, The Italics are Mine. When Tatyana Tolstaya was interviewed about it the other day she said: 'I don't know her personally, but she is maybe the strongest personality I have ever felt in a book. This personality tries to convince me of the image she creates, but it doesn't. I feel she creates an image which is not truthful, and I recognize her right to do that. I feel she's quite different, a mysterious personality strong enough to create an image that works, but for me the real personality behind all that is much more interesting than the person she wants us to believe in.' Mystery and strength are alluring, so this admiring but subliminally catty response is more of a turn-on than any blurb could be. -- Gabriele Annan, New York Review of Books, September 26, 1991

Review

Nina Berberova's (1901-1993) The Tattered Cloak, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz, collects six stories dealing with Russian exiles of various backgrounds living in Paris just before World War II. "The Resurrection of Mozart" focuses on a woman anxiously awaiting her husband's return home as she juggles French soldiers, her disabled son and a mysterious vagrant musician. The title story is narrated by Sasha, who moves from Petersburg to Paris with her father and for years is haunted by the memory of her older sister. Berberova has been compared to Chekhov, and these stories glow with a quiet intensity. -- Publishers Weekly, June 26, 1991

Review

Nina Berberova's THE TATTERED CLOAK AND OTHER STORIES is a collection by arguably one of the best of the Russian writers from the early part of the last century. The experience of Russian émigrés in Paris is a classic story of displacement and future shock, after the ravages of war and a bad economy sent families rushing towards the heart of the Western world. Berberova could very well be telling her own story, hidden amongst the tales of lowly blue-collar workers and the "shabby genteel" of the aristocracy that doesn't know what to make of the brave new world that is building its foundations.

"The world is going to hell, but among it all a blessed light is burning quietly for me --- not from the star, which went out a long time ago, but from a new source, like a fog filled with the trembling light of stars." In gentle phrases and with the light touch of a truly enlightened heart, Berberova gives us an across-the-board look at how the world was changing and affecting all of her fellow Russians during the difficult times of the '30s and '40s. Given what our nation has lived through since that time, American readers will certainly empathize with the hardships of these people that were searching for ways to stay alive and perhaps even eke out a little enjoyment for themselves. It is in their heartache, their search for a new life, that Berberova enacts her timeless compassion, and each story brings us closer to the heart of the immigrant experience from the easy perspective of seven decades of historical progression.

Berberova came to the U. S. in 1951 with $75 in her pocket. An instructor at Yale and later at Princeton, she was honored as a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters before she died. Like her countryman, Chekov, Berberova employs the direct and intellectual perceptions of a natural writer with the heart of a renegade, and in so doing, THE TATTERED CLOAK can find a home amongst the immigrant classics of our generation and those that came before us. -- Jana Siciliano, Bookreporter.com

Review

The story proves to be a work of breathtaking artistic unity. Details that seemed random and incoherent fall into place as elements of an intricate design...If a story is to seem at all original...its order must somehow be disguised, known only in retrospect, and those laws of necessity governing the function of detail must be masked. --- "Three Journeys, Anton Chekov on the Road," Janet Malcolm, The New Yorker, October 29, 2001

There are some that have it, but there are most that don't. How many short story writers know how to weave the whole together so that there is a marriage of symbols and rhythm and choice-of-words of such quality that those of us who have in our lives tried to write fiction lay the book aside and say, "Never again." Thus Nina Berberova.

How did she slip under the radar screen all these years? Lord knows, she stayed around long enough --- 1901 - 1993. Possibly it is because she wrote in Russian, was translated into French long before finally being rendered into English (the six stories in The Tattered Cloak first appeared in England just ten years ago).

We know we are in the hands of a master when, early on, a tiny jewel appears, set in such a way that it reflects the whole, a mini-mirror for an entire story. This is "Astashev in Paris;" we are being told about his house. In the rooms,

fat spiders spun their webs up by the ceilings. His mother and nurse, who were preoccupied with cleaning the painted floors and starching the curtains, never knocked them down. Sometimes in the evenings, engulfed in their own brocade and protected by female superstition, the spiders ran out to the middle of the ceiling, fell on one another, and sucked each other dry, whereupon they shriveled up and fell to the floor.

The floors were painted. The curtains starched. The spiders were fat, "engulfed in their own brocade" and "protected by female superstition." What more do we need in order to envision the world that Astashev achieves later in Paris where he spends his days selling life insurance to his fellow, using techniques of shame, a full regalia of horror-to-come (What will happen to your wife? To your children? When you are no longer....?) The bodies that are to fall, while they are still aloft, being sucked dry, expertly, by one of their own.

The title story is a bleak tale of Sasha, who works years ironing clothes in a large cleaning establishment, saying to herself, "Why? Why, though I had committed no crime, did I end up standing at an ironing board for nine years lifting a heavy iron?" A bleak life, as bad as any out of Dickens, Zola, or Dostoyevsky, working and living in her tiny apartment with her dying father and her crippled aunt. And once day, she turns on the radio, spins the dial, and

Suddenly someone said gently and with all the conviction the human voice is capable of..."You're still here? You're still here? But I swear to you, they're waiting for you. Everything's all set for your arrival. The orange trees are blooming in the gardens, and from the windows of the white villa you can see to the bottom of the sea. And you know, in the evening dark blue dragonflies like you've never seen flit around the garden. It's time for you to go. It's time!"

And then, "A moments silence. The thunder of applause. And apparently, the heavy rustle of a falling curtain."

What can we say? Page after page of the bleak dead-end of another life, and then, suddenly, orange trees, a villa where "you can see to the bottom of the sea," and, in the evening, "dark blue dragonflies like you've never seen..." As my sainted grandmother would say, hand on chest, when she saw or heard something unexpected, something unexpectedly gorgeous, "Ay! Mamacita linda!"

The story "The Black Spot" refers to a flaw in Evgeny's jewels, the ones that she thought were perfect, the ones she has been paying on in hock for years and years. The jewel with the black flaw comes center stage at the early part of the story, but begins to have a richer meaning only as we get to know Evgeny better. She comes from Russia, lives in Paris, hocks all she has to migrate to New York, and then ends up in Chicago.

Each of the parts of her journey takes on its own rhythm and strange shading: trying to pawn her flawed black jewelry while living with Alya in Paris; Ludmila, the daughter of her employer in New York who becomes smitten with her; and finally, the mysterious Druzhin that she is to meet in Chicago.

This is Evgeny telling Ludmila about why she wants to go to Chicago, tells of the streets (even though she has yet to go there):

"On these narrow streets, from roofs to pavements, there are staircases, on the outside, fire escapes, like broken lines in the air, against a sky that is white in the day or red at night. Those stairs make you think of the reverse side of life, of buildings, of the city, they make you think of the flies backstage in a gigantic theatre. Once in a while motionless figures sleep on them, hunched and hanging like black sacks..."

"Have you ever been there?" she asked, looking at me in amazement.

"No, I haven't."

"How do you know all that?"

I didn't answer.

This on Kalyagin, her boss in New York, father to Ludmila: "On my way out I sometimes had to put iodine on his waist; he believed that iodine was a universal panacea. His body was well groomed, a touch yellow, with large birthmarks." A detail, a sharpness that suddenly pulls the character up for us, makes Kalyagin real, alive. It is Berberova's impeccable ability to capture the touch or look or strangeness of a person (or a place) in such a few words:

Every city has its own smell. Paris smells of gas, tar, and face powder; Berlin, when I was younger, smelled of gas, cigar, and dog; New York smells of gas, dust, and soup, especially on hot days and hot nights, which can only be broken by a sudden thunderstorm or a hurricane from Labrador or the Caribbean.

So much of Berberova lies in that vague word, pacing. We live with Evgeny during the heart-stopping sequence of digging up enough funds to emigrate to America; we are with her when she finds Ludmila in love with her; then, during all this, she turns, paints a picture of herself that is at odds with what we have experienced of her. A contrary self-portrait that, despite all that, rings true. For, she is like all of us, what we are and what we say we are must be in conflict:

"Ludmila Lvovna," I said. "Be quiet. I have no idea how you've managed to deceive yourself to such an extent. I lack what everyone else has --- the ability to die inside and come back to life. I don't like life or people, and I'm afraid of them, like most people are, probably even more than most people. I'm not free, I haven't really enjoyed anything for a long time, and I'm not honest because I didn't tell you anything about myself for so long, and now, when I do, it's so difficult."

With this singular speech ("the ability to die inside and come back to life!") she takes her leave of Ludmila, entrains for Chicago, ostensibly to find Druzhin. She has told all the others that ultimately she will go to Chicago to find Druzhin. And when she finally gets there, it turns out... o no: Druzhin doesn't exist. Never did.

It is this exquisite marriage of detail, imagination, paradox and perfidy that drives Berberova's stories --- drives them with a singularity that makes it hard to stop reading (often because we want to save some for tomorrow).

The quote at the top of this review has to do with Chekov, but Berberova is one of his spiritual heirs. Like him, she constructs her own rules: what to include, what to leave out, what to emphasize. And I claim it is these self-designed, self-imposed rules of fiction that turn a story that might be interesting into a masterpiece. Fat spiders. Hurricanes "from Labrador or the Caribbean." The smell of face powder. Sleeping figures hanging like black sacks. Iodine as a universal panacea. Dark blue dragonflies like you've never seen.

They all fit; they all work; we are in the hands of a divine master. -- Carlos Amantea, RALPH Magazine, Fall 2001

Review

“An age . . . had ended with August 1921,” Nina Berberova writes in her autobiography, The Italics Are Mine. “All that came after was only a continuation of this August.” On August 24, sixty-two had been shot in St. Petersburg, including Nikolai Gumilev, who had worked with Mandelstam and Akhmatova — thus the odyssey of Russia in the twentieth century, which sent Russians, including Berberova, into exile, and those who stayed into silence, if not Siberia and death. The world as one had known it was gone, and it was not only the Russian experience, but for much of Europe, the modern one, to be replaced by a world in which survival, no matter how it might be accomplished, was less an achievement than an accident. Bureaucracy and the machine did not permit one to breathe in either the East or the West. The world of Kafka, and that of Walser, had come to be everyday. “The future loomed like a weight he couldn’t budge,” one of Berberova’s characters thinks. Her stories of Russian exiles in Paris in the thirties and forties are less stories than evidence entered into the court record. They describe “a special shabbiness that began and ended with . . . life abroad”; the lack of any future or possibility; the burden of a past one can never rid oneself of but must, somehow, anesthetize oneself against (“To nowhere,” Evgeni Petrovich says of his moves from Paris to New York to Chicago, “to see no one”). A waiter who saves a woman from starvation and the streets, falls in love with her only to be rejected. He strangles her and thinks, “thank God, there was no future.” A woman in her thirties who has endured loneliness all her life kills herself after she is seduced by another exile, a successful life insurance agent who preys upon exiles (life insurance, as they say, for those who have neither life nor insurance). Sasha, a young girl in St. Petersburg, listens to friends of her older sister discuss art, poetry, and theater, and years later as a laundry worker in Paris, remembers several lines of a poem that had been recited that night: “But we the heirs of Blok/Are helpless to forget.” Berberova, who left St. Petersburg for Prague, Berlin, Paris, and America, where she taught at Princeton, will not turn her back on her past to re-create herself, as so many who came to the new world did. She remembers so we won’t forget. -- Robert Buckeye, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 2001

A spellbinding short novel set in post-revolutionary Russian about a young girl's jealousy. The fifth book of Nina Berberova to be published by New Directions, The Accompanist, written in 1936, proved to be a literary phenomenon in Europe where it was first published. A spellbinding, short novel set in post-revolutionary Russia, The Accompanist, portrays with extraordinary sensitivity the entangled relationships of three intriguing characters. Sonechka is a talented but shy young pianist hired by a beautiful soprano (Maria Nikolaevna) and her devoted, bourgeois husband. Maria is everything Sonechka is not - glamorous and flamboyant. Her voice brings with it "something immortal and indisputable, something which gives reality to the human being's dream of having wings." Doomed to live in her mentor's shadow, the young girl secretly schemes to expose the singer's infidelities. But as she awaits her chance, the diva's husband takes matters into his own hands, bringing events to a surprising resolution. This intense and beautiful little novel was published in America almost fifty years after it was written; sadly out of print for a number of years, it is a wonderfully compelling and crucial addition to Nina Berberova's growing number of published fictional works.

A curious book, certainly one worth reading...for the richness of the language and the slim peek of a turbulent Russia. -- Wendy Zollo, Historical Novels Review, November 2003

A slight yet moving work that throbs with very real pathos. -- Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2003

A splendid, tragically beautiful writer capable of drawing unforgettable characters ... sublime. -- Los Angeles Times

Review

Written in 1936 and published here for the first time, this slender novel is an elegant exposition of Russian temperament. The accompanist of the title is Sonechka, an 18-year-old girl, talented but impoverished and self-deprecating by reason of her lowly origin. She is abruptly lifted from her bleak life in St. Petersburg when a famous soprano, Maria Travin, employs her as a traveling companion. The ambitious singer and her successful bourgeois husband are the center of a coterie that flows with them from Moscow to Paris in 1920, and Sonechka becomes privy to their sophisticated relationships. A confidante to Maria and yet ever watchful, insecure and apart, Sonechka internalizes her distress with life in postwar Russia and harbors plans for revenge on the affluent, beautiful diva by exposing her extramarital affair. The resolution of her plan comes about in an unexpected manner, one that is entirely out of Sonechka's control but that frees her as, in a different way, it frees the implacable diva. Exquisitely spare, the first-person narrative of this novella has a subdued intensity. Russian-born Berberova lives in New Jersey, where she was professor of Russian literature at Princeton. -- Publishers Weekly, 1988

Review

The title character of this slim, spare novel is our narrator, Sonechka Antonovskaya, a young woman of modest means who comes to work for a glamorous opera soprano, Maria Nikolaevna Travina, at the height of postrevolutionary Russia’s hard times. Written in 1936 and published to much acclaim in Europe, The Accompanist’s central narrative is propelled by a brand of envy and longing at once eerie and sublime. This wanting sits largely with Sonechka’s dueling desires: the desire to be Maria and the desire to accept the lesser gift of her love — an option problematic only partly because it’s never actually offered. This emotional seesaw also characterizes Sonechka’s feelings toward Pavel Fyodorovich, Maria’s dubiously employed bourgeois husband. Rather predictably, Pavel’s presence heightens tensions that were already high, particularly once Sonechka learns of Maria’s ongoing extramarital affair. Still, Berberova is clearly playing with more here than initially meets the eye, because while the tricky triad of emotions include jealousy as well as rage, what makes The Accompanist such a captivating read is that the passion play isn’t necessarily the “real” story at all. Take, for example, the framing device Berberova employs at the story’s very start. This first narrative voice soberly explains that the pages before us were acquired for him “by a Mr. L. R., who bought them from a junk dealer,” who in turn had bought them off a landlady from “a cheap hotel where a Russian woman had lived and died.” We’re also told that her various personal effects were up for sale as well, referring to these items as “all that is left after a woman vanishes.” Like Berberova’s short, elegant tale, such a provocative turn of phrase seems ripe for mulling over, even after the writer is gone. -- Stacy Gottlieb, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 2003