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

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

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

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 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