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.

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