Nina Berberova

Nina Berberova

Nina Berberova (1901–1993), born in St. Petersburg, left Russia in 1922, lived in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Italy, and finally settled in Paris in 1925. There she wrote prolifically for publication in the émigré press. She came to the United States in 1951 and taught at Yale and Princeton. In France, she was honored as a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters. She passed away in 1993.

Billancourt Tales

by Nina Berberova

Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz

Billancourt Tales collects thirteen superb stories from those Nina Berberova wrote in Paris between 1928 and 1940 for the émigré newspaper The Latest News. In Berberova’s own words, these stories contain traces of “human tears that were more like the drop formations on a piece of Edam cheese than the dew on a rose petal.” Billancourt, a highly industrialized suburb of Paris, gave Berberova her subject. Here thousands of exiled Russians — White Guards, civilians, and Berberova herself — were finding work and establishing a home away from home with their Russian churches, schools, and small business ventures.…
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The Accompanist

by Nina Berberova

Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz

A spellbinding, short novel set in post-revolutionary Russia, The Accompanist portrays with extraordinary sensitivity the entangled relationships of three 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, 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.…
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The Book of Happiness

by Nina Berberova

Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz

The Book of Happiness is the most autobiographical of the novels the great Russian writer Nina Berberova (1901-1993) wrote during the years she lived in Paris. “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 closest childhood companion, Sam Adler, whose family left Russia in the early days of the revolution and whom Vera has not seen in many years.…
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The Tattered Cloak

by Nina Berberova

Translated from the Russian by Nina Berberova

First published in Europe in the 1930s and 40s, these searing, evocative stories by the late Russian expatriate 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.
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The Ladies from St. Petersburg

by Nina Berberova

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.…
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Cape of Storms

by Nina Berberova

Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz

In Cape of Storms, Nina Berberova portrays a very specific generation––one born in Russia, displaced by the Revolution, and trying to adapt to a new home, Paris. Three sisters––Dasha, Sonia, and Zai––share the same father, Tiagen, an attractive, weak-willed, womanizing White Russian, but each thinks differently about her inner world of beliefs and aspirations, and consequently each follows a different path. Dasha marries and leaves for a bourgeois expatriate life in colonial Africa.…
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The Tattered Cloak

by Nina Berberova

Translated from the Russian by Nina Berberova

First published in Europe in the 1930s and 40s, these searing, evocative stories by the late Russian expatriate 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.
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Berberova’s wonderful novel about three love affairs… Like Turgenev and Chekhov, of whom she is the rightful heir, is uncannily shrewd about romance, about its bright promise, without making her characters’ real satisfaction seem trite.
—New York Review of Books
An elegant voice from the past speaks lucidly in three fine long stories … moving and memorable …
—Kirkus Reviews
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 the deaths.
—New York Times Book Review
A marvel of perversity.
—Elle
The thirteen stories of Billancourt Tales are closely observed, potently phrased and dapperly shaped…Marian Schwartz’s English translation deftly captures the fanciful twists and turns of Berberova’s imagination…Indispensable.
—New York Times Book Review
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