Nina Berberova

Novels originally published in the 1930s and 1940s reveal the lives and uncertain futures of Russian housekeepers, waiters, intellectuals, and aristocrats exiled in Paris on the eve of World War II.

The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories

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 belongingexcept in moments of epiphanyto 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 sinceher 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.

The Book of Happiness

Eslikci Kiz

Doomed to living in her mentor's shadow, Sonechka, a talented but mousy young pianist employed by a beautiful soprano and her devoted, bourgeois husband, secretly schemes to expose infidelities.

The Accompanist

The fourth book by the great Russian writer (author of The Accompanist, The Italics Are Mine) to be translated into English. Three stories 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 Berverova knew from personal experience. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The Ladies from St. Petersburg

Le dernier roman qu'ait écrit Nina Berberova (mais non le dernier à paraître), où elle évoque de la manière la plus achevée le désespérance de l'émigration.

Le mal noir

Collected together in one volume, these three novels create a portrait of Russian emigres in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s.

Three Novels

This is the autobiography of Nina Berberova, who was born in St Petersburg in 1901, the only child of an Armenian father and a North Russian mother. After the Revolution, and the persecution of intellectuals which followed, she was forced to flee to Paris, where she was to remain for 25 years. There she formed part of a group of literary Russian emigres that included Gorky, Bunin, Svetaeva, Nabokov and Akhmatova, and earned a precarious living as a journalist, barely surviving the hardship and poverty of exile. In 1950 she left France for the United States to begin a new life with no money and no knowledge of English. She is now a retired Professor of Russian Literature at Princeton, and has belatedly been acclaimed for the short novels she wrote in the 1930s and '40s.

The Italics are Mine

"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 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, not in their artistry. But the reader will demur, for these are fine stories, the kind that have lead to comparison to Chekhov. They portray a wide range of human beings and the twists and turns of their various lives."--BOOK JACKET.

Billancourt Tales

شنل پاره

El junco rebelde

La misura perfetta per Nina Berberova è il racconto lungo, che attraversa un destino e un personaggio con il sibilo di una freccia. Qui si tratterà del destino di Tanja, la «puttana»; di lei seguiamo le avventure da Pietroburgo al Giappone, alla Cina, a Parigi: donna rapace, sensuale, sordida, disegnata con magistrale economia di tratti e intensità nel dettaglio, figura che merita di occupare un suo posto nella galleria delle grandi abiette della letteratura russa. E accanto a lei, puntuale controcanto, apparirà il «lacchè», ex ufficiale della cavalleria zarista, finito come cameriere a servire caviale in un ristorante. Lo sfondo è la Parigi dei russi bianchi, quinta mobile della disperazione e della degradazione. Lo scioglimento non può che essere sinistro – e, come sempre nella Berberova, cela una punta che si rivela solo nelle ultime righe. «Il lacchè e la puttana» è apparso per la prima volta, in russo, nel 1937 su «Sovremennye Zapiski».

Il lacchè e la puttana

Moura, the Baroness Budberg, hailed from the Russian aristocracy and lived in the lap of luxury, until the Bolshevik Revolution forced her to live by her wits.

The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg

Moura

The first English translation of celebrated Russian writer Nina Berberova's debut novel: an intense story the struggle over the future of émigré life On a crisp September morning, trouble comes to the Gorbatovs' farm. Having fled the ruins of the Russian Revolution, they have endured crushing labour to set up a small farm in Provence. For young Ilya Stepanovich, this is to be the future of Russian life in France; for some of his Paris-dwelling countrymen, it is a betrayal of roots, culture and the path back to the motherland. Now, with the arrival of a letter from the capital and a figure from the family's past, their fragile stability is threatened by a plot to lure Ilya's step-brother Vasya back to Russia. In prose of masterful poise and restraint, Nina Berberova dramatises the passionate internal struggles of a generation of Russian émigrés. Translated into English for the first time by the acclaimed Marian Schwartz, The Last and the First marks a unique contribution to Russian literature.

The Last and the First

Qu'elle mette en scène (De cape et de larmes) le destin tragique de deux sœurs dont l'une voit son homme envoyé au goulag et l'autre part s'installer à Paris avec son père, qu'elle évoque (Le Roseau révolté) le destin de deux amants séparés par la guerre ou qu'elle raconte (Le Mal noir) l'exil vers Les Etats-Unis d'un Russe émigré dont la compagne est morte pendant un bombardement en France, Nina Berberova n'a de cesse qu'elle ne rende dans ses plus subtiles variations la détresse profonde de ces immigrés de la première génération, dépouillés de leur langue, de leurs affections, de leur territoire. Avec le premier volume des Récits de l'exil, voici donc réunis dans Babel l'ensemble des " petits romans " écrits de 1934 à 1959 sur ce thème par la romancière russe.

Volume II - De cape et de larmes ; Le Roseau révolté ; Le Mal noir

Récits de l'exil

De cape et de larmes, Le Roseau révolté, Le Mal noir.

Récits de l'exil Volume 2

A Life

Aleksandr Blok

Baroness Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya Benckendorff Budberg hailed from the Russian aristocracy and lived in the lap of luxury—until the Bolshevik Revolution forced her to live by her wits. Thereafter her existence was a story of connivance and stratagem, a succession of unlikely twists and turns. Intimately involved in the mysterious Lockhart affair, a conspiracy which almost brought down the fledgling Soviet state, mistress to Maxim Gorky and then to H.G. Wells, Moura was a woman of enormous energy, intelligence, and charm whose deepest passion was undoubtedly the mythologization of her own life. Recognized as one of the great masters of Russian twentieth-century fiction, Nina Berberova here proves again that she is the unsurpassed chronicler of the lives of Soviet émigrés. In Moura Budberg, a woman who shrouded the facts of her life in fiction, Berberova finds the ideal material from which to craft a triumph of literary portraiture, a book as engaging and as full of life and incident as any one of her celebrated novels.

Three sisters, Dasha, Sonia, and Zai, who were born in Russia but displaced by the Revolution, begin a new life in Paris.

Cape of Storms

Nina Nikolaevna Berberova

In a collection of thirteen short works written between 1928 and 1940 for an migr newspaper, a group of homesick Russians scramble to build lives in their new Parisian suburb homes, efforts that are shaped by the community developments of Russian churches, schools, and small businesses. Reprint.

Nina Berberova

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