Berberova, Nina Nikolaevna

(b. 8 August 1901 in Saint Petersburg, Russia; d. 26 September 1993 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), Russian émigré writer whose autobiography, The Italics Are Mine (1969), chronicled nearly a century of intellectual life in tsarist Russia, the early Soviet Union, and exile in Paris.

Berberova was the only child of Nikolai Ivanovich Berberov, an Armenian civil servant in Russia’s Ministry of Finance whose family had acquired land and moved into the gentry class under Catherine the Great, and Natalia Ivanovna Karaulova. Berberova’s maternal great-grandfather, Karaulov, a landowner in the province of Tver, was the model for Ivan Goncharov’s fictional hero Oblomov— the prototypical “superfluous man” of the nineteenth century, a recurrent literary type in many Russian novels including Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Mikhail Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time.

Berberova had a privileged childhood in tsarist Russia that came to an end with World War I. She briefly enrolled in the department of philology at Rostov University, but the Bolshevik Revolution interrupted her education. She was one of the last of her class to attend a university in Russia. Returning to Saint Petersburg, now called Petrograd, she joined the Poets’ Guild and became part of the vibrant but increasingly imperiled literary life of that city. In 1922 she and the symbolist poet Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939), with whom she had fallen in love, left Russia together and traveled throughout Europe. They spent part of the time as members of Maksim Gorky’s peripatetic household, before Gorky returned to Russia. About Gorky she observed, perhaps harshly, “It was always more important for him to be heard than to speak out.”

In 1925 Berberova and Khodasevich finally settled into the Russian intellectual community in Paris, which she called a “unique generation of deprived, broken, silenced, stripped, homeless, destitute, disenfranchised and therefore half-educated poets.” Among the writers she describes in her autobiography are Andrey Bely, Vladimir Nabokov, Ivan Bunin (winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize for Literature), Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, and scores of others. She singles out Nabokov as a genius who was “able to bring in a renewal of style.”

Berberova remained in Paris for twenty-five years, and for most of that time she wrote short fiction, cultural criticism, and news articles for Russian-language publications including Poslednie Novosti (The Latest News) and later Russkaya Mysl’ (Russian Thought). She describes the Russian community of these years, struggling to maintain itself even as Stalinist Russia conspired to destroy it, hating the Soviet regime yet “entangled in a common web.”

In 1932 Berberova left Khodasevich, although she remained on good terms with him and Olga, the woman he subsequently married. In 1937 she married Nikolai Makeyev, a Russian émigré painter, and moved to Longchene, a rural suburb of Paris, where they lived in extreme poverty throughout World War II. They divorced nine years later in 1946, and in 1950, Berberova emigrated once again, this time to the United States, where in 1954 she married the musician George Kochevitsky in order to become a U.S. citizen. They divorced in 1983.

During her early years in the United States, Berberova edited books for the Chekhov Publishing House in New York City and served on the editorial board of the Russian literary journal Mosty (Bridges). She began a new career in 1958 when she joined the Slavic department at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1963 she moved to Princeton University, in New Jersey, where she taught Russian literature until she retired in 1971, following which she continued to teach and lecture at various institutions in the United States, including Cornell, Columbia, Bryn Mawr College, Middlebury College, and the University of Pennsylvania. She received honorary doctorates from Middlebury and Yale.

When Berberova was in her eighties, she enjoyed unexpected good fortune. In 1985 the French publishing house Actes Sud began issuing her fiction in French translation. Her books sold so well that she remained on the French best-seller lists for nearly a decade, which brought her financial independence and great personal satisfaction. Her fiction in French translation attracted the notice of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who brought Berberova to the attention of American publishers and readers. Actes Sud translated and published her fiction in more than twenty-two languages, including English.

In 1989 she paid a visit to her homeland, sixty-seven years after leaving, courtesy of an invitation from the Union of Writers. Two years later she watched the collapse of the Soviet Union. She had outlived the Revolution. Berberova died in a nursing home in Philadelphia of complications from a fall at the age of ninety-two.

Most of Berberova’s fiction was written during her years in Paris, and her disaffected heroines reflect Berberova’s life on the edge of desperation, lonely yet claustrophobically confined to a narrow existence. The Bookof Happiness (1999; originally published in Russian as Kniga schast ’e) is her most autobiographical novel. The protagonist, Vera, grows up in a comfortable household in tsarist Saint Petersburg but after the Revolution marries an invalid and emigrates to Paris, where she leads a life of drudgery. Only at the end of the novel is there a glimpse of redemption, when she falls in love for the first time: “She felt like saying that despite the fact that it was going to be an uphill road, the round-the-world journey was over.”

The French director Claude Miller adapted Berberova’s 1934 novella The Accompanist for his film, L’Accompagnatrice (1992), about an impoverished young pianist hired to accompany a beautiful but selfish opera singer; the accompanist becomes so obsessed with her employer’s life that she ruins her own. The film was a commercial success in France and in the United States.

In addition to her autobiography and fiction, Berberova wrote a biography of Tchaikovsky, in which she openly discusses his homosexuality, and a life of Aleksandr Blok, the finest symbolist poet of Russia’s “Silver Age.” Berberova was an important part of the modernist movement in twentieth-century Russian literature, and because of her personal descriptions of so many Russian writers, she provides an invaluable record of an entire era.

Berberova’s papers are in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and in the Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection in the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. The Beinecke collection contains correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, personal papers, and memorabilia chiefly from the years 1950 to 1993. The papers are written in Russian, English, French, and German. The bulk of her early papers (1922–1950) are at the Hoover Institution. Berberova’s autobiography, The Italics Are Mine (1969; originally published in Russian as Kursiv moi: autobiografiid), is the best source of her life. Berberova’s English translator, Marian Schwartz, has written an eloquent introduction to The Ladies from St. Petersburg, (1995; originally published in Russian as Baryni), and Ken Kalfus reviewed it for the New York Times Book (Review (1 Nov. 1998). Claire Messud reviewed Cape of Storms (1999; originally published in Russian as Mys bur) for the New York Times Book Review (9 Jan. 2000). An obituary is in the New York Times (29 Sept. 1993).

Lesley S. Herrmann