Short biography of the Russian writer of worldly talents.
Nina Berberova was born in 1901 in St. Petersburg, to a father of Armenian descent and a Russian mother. As a child she loved to read and think intensely, and without much prompting gravitated toward the local society of poets and intellectuals. Unfortunately, Nina’s coming of age coincided with the 1917 Russian Revolution and overthrow of the Czar, and the new order did not have much use for poets, writers or artists, unless they wished to become voices of propaganda. Those who did not want to use their talents in that manner were often persecuted or sometimes even killed.
Shortly after the publication of her first poem in 1922, Berberova left St. Petersburg with another poet, Vladislav Khodasevich. They initially moved to Berlin, where many other Russian exiles had taken residence, and then drifted further around Europe, ultimately settling in Paris where Berberova would remain for the next twenty-five years.
Paris between the wars was a tough place for Russian émigrés, who like Nina Berberova often found themselves having to work at jobs they would never have dreamed of taking in their more privileged youth. Berberova’s collection The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels finely details this sense of displacement and the lost hopes and ironic humor of her fellow countrymen and women, including a former cavalry officer reduced to waiting restaurant tables—and to secretly eating leftovers off the plates of patrons. The Tattered Cloak is an excellent example of Berberova’s skill at the genre of the Russian povosti, or longer short story, which she always claimed was her favorite type of writing.
After parting ways with Khodasevich, who had become her first husband, and marrying another Russian, Berberova waited out World War II in the French countryside then returned to Paris in 1947. In 1950 she left her second husband and moved to the United States, teaching herself English with her usual resourceful determination while working as a file clerk. By 1958 she had begun her academic career as a professor at Yale and then later Princeton, where she remained until her retirement in 1971. Never one to slow down, Berberova continued to lecture and visit other universities, and in 1989 she returned to her native country for the first time since she had left it in 1922.
In the last decades of her life, Berberova began to experience a sudden discovery of her literary talents, mostly brought on by the appreciation of French publisher Hubert Nyssen. Nyssen reissued several of her works and by the early 1990s, her writing had been published in the United States as well, including her autobiographical memoir, The Italics are Mine, and her highly-praised novella, The Accompanist. The Accompanist has been called a darkly perfect gem of a short novel, again dealing with Russians in Paris and the story of a young girl who plays the piano for a celebrated opera singer, and her feelings of inferiority and isolation even amid such a glittering and exciting world. In 1992, The Accompanist was adapted into a French film directed by Claude Miller and starring actor Richard Bohringer and his daughter Romane.
Since Nina Berberova's 1993 death in Philadelphia, even more of her work has been published in several languages, as readers worldwide discover the elegant prose and observations of this survivor of so many tumultuous 20th century events.
_________________________________
The Italics Are Mine – Nina Berberova (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)
The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels – Nina Berberova (Vintage Books, 1992)
Nina Berberova Papers, Yale University
