Nina Berberova (1901–1993)
Author of The Accompanist
About the Author
Born in 1901 in pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg, Russia, Nina Berberova emigrated in 1922, living in several European countries before settling in the United States. She wrote frequently for the leading journals and anthologies of the first wave of the Russian emigration. The Italics Are Mine show more (1969), her autobiography, is an important record of that period. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Berberova
Works by Nina Berberova
Three novels: The Resurrection of Mozart, The Waiter and the Slut, Astachev in Paris (1990) 19 copies
Récits de l'exil, tome 1 : L'Accompagnatrice - Roquenval le laquais et la putain - Astachev à Paris - La… (1991) 9 copies
Los pommes 2 copies
Dove non si parla d'amore 1 copy
"Rasskazy v izgnanii". 1 copy
Felicita: romanzo 1 copy
Nabokov i ego "Lolita" ;: Chaikovskii ; Zheleznaia zhenshchina ; Rasskazy v izgnanii (Russian Edition) (2001) 1 copy
La peste negra 1 copy
U nas doma lev 1 copy
Borodine (Musique) 1 copy
O Lacaio e a Puta 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Berberova, Nina
- Legal name
- Berberova, Nina Nikolayevna
- Other names
- Бербе́рова, Ни́на Никола́евна
- Birthdate
- 1901-07-26
- Date of death
- 1993-09-26
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- Russia (birth)
USA (naturalized) - Birthplace
- St Petersburg, Russian Empire
- Place of death
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
- Places of residence
- St Petersburg, Russia
Paris, France
Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Berlin, Germany
Prague, Czechoslovakia - Education
- Rostov University
- Occupations
- writer
professor
critic
translator - Relationships
- Khodasevich, Vladislav (partner - but never married)
Kochevitsky, George (2nd husband) - Organizations
- Princeton University
Poslednye Novosti(Russian-language daily) - Awards and honors
- Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters (by the French Government in 1989)
- Short biography
- Nina Berberova was brought up in St. Petersburg. She and her companion Vladislav Khodasevich, a poet, lived in the household of Maxim Gorky for some years before leaving Russia in 1922 and eventually settling in Paris. She became part of a distinguished literary circle, and wrote short stories and novels about Russian émigrés such as herself. Khodasevich died in 1939, and in 1950 Nina Berberova moved to the USA, where she taught herself English and worked as a clerk before becoming a professor of Russian literature at Princeton University. Her autobiography is titled (in English) The Italics Are Mine. In 1985, her novel written in French were rediscovered by Hubert Nyssen, director of the publishing house Actes Sud, which began to re-issue her works.
Members
Reviews
I was ready to give this five stars but the tone of the book started changing towards the end; the stories lost their hard edge and became dreamy (the change starts somewhere in the middle of "The Dark Spot"). They were still well written, but to my taste not nearly as affecting. "The Waiter and the Slut" is as cutting as a George Grosz drawing, but "In Memory of Schliemann" is perhaps more akin to the sentimental art of Ben Shahn--not bad, but far from great.
The Book of Happiness, although apparently written in the 1990s, at the end of Berberova’s long life, reads like a modernist novel of the early 20th century. (Both Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson come to mind). This despite the author’s own references to Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Garshin as well as to Jules Verne. The Book of Happiness is divided into three sections each of which is an account (although not in any reportorial sense) of a love affair/ relationship. Three sections, but four men with whom the protagonist Vera becomes involved in some way. Each man stands, in a sense, for an aspect of the old Russia of memory, story and childhood dreams. In fact it is their storytelling that creates a common denominator among the four men in Vera’s life (five if one counts Vera’s father).
It is Berberova’s treatment of time, I believe, that places her writing in the camp of the 20th century Moderns. In Part Three, Vera notes that she is “alone with time, which was passing, making her neither mortal nor immortal” and that “she felt not that time was flowing through her but that she herself was time. Berberova’s prose is hallucinatory and dream-like throughout; she segues from image to image, episode to episode, as if splicing frames in a film.” The novel opens with the image of a suicide. A young man, a concert violinist named Sam, has been found dead in his Paris hotel room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He has left the address and telephone number of Vera, his closest childhood friend, on his night stand for the hotel staff to find. Here, from the very beginning, Berberova explicitly invokes cinematic techniques: “Through the window [of her dead friend’s hotel room:] she could see the Place de l’Opéra and the beginning of the Boulevard des Capucines, as if someone had started some director’s old film running on the screen of the window.” Gazing at Sam’s dead body, Vera muses that “It was like trying to lay a negative over a printed photograph so that they coincided.” In his last letter, Sam wrote, “I’m bored. I wanted something I couldn’t have, and everything I did get bored me.” For Sam, despite love, “life is the enemy.” For Vera, life is the experience of happiness, a happiness that she defines as that which lasts. Part I of the novel concerns itself with Vera and Sam’s childhood and adolescent friendship: Vera and Sam meet in St. Petersburg when Vera is 10 and Sam is 9 (circa 1911). Sam is Jewish, Vera, Christian. Sam’s father is a lawyer and Vera’s an engineer. From the day they meet, Vera and Sam spend every free moment together. Sam’s world is that of the imagination. He is a fanciful teller of tales and the two children create an almost hermetic world together, one that lasts until Sam’s family must emigrate in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian revolution. Vera remains behind in Petersburg to endure the hunger and scarcity as well as the change in social conditions brought about by the political turmoil of the era. Soon, she too leaves Russia for Paris, along with her newly-wed, tubercular, and soon-to-be dead husband Alexander Albertovich (Alexander’s father was French, although a naturalized Russian citizen). Part II accounts for the love story (if it is one) between Vera and Alexander and the first years of Vera’s life as a Russian émigré in Paris. Part III takes place after Alexander’s death and involves two subsequent relationships: one between Vera and Daskovsky, one of Vera’s beautiful mother’s four former lovers. Daskovsky becomes something of a flawed (perhaps even suspect) mentor or confidante to Vera. A second relationship links Vera and Karelov, whom Vera encounters in the south of France after her also-widowed sister-in-law Lise whisks her away following Alexander’s funeral. Vera returns to Paris a year and a half later, freshly determined to experience, and thus to know, the fullness of life and happiness, She is soon followed there by Karelov, who appears without notice at her door. They resume their affair in what appears to be a blissful state of matter-of-factness. Upon this note, the novel ends.
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It is Berberova’s treatment of time, I believe, that places her writing in the camp of the 20th century Moderns. In Part Three, Vera notes that she is “alone with time, which was passing, making her neither mortal nor immortal” and that “she felt not that time was flowing through her but that she herself was time. Berberova’s prose is hallucinatory and dream-like throughout; she segues from image to image, episode to episode, as if splicing frames in a film.” The novel opens with the image of a suicide. A young man, a concert violinist named Sam, has been found dead in his Paris hotel room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He has left the address and telephone number of Vera, his closest childhood friend, on his night stand for the hotel staff to find. Here, from the very beginning, Berberova explicitly invokes cinematic techniques: “Through the window [of her dead friend’s hotel room:] she could see the Place de l’Opéra and the beginning of the Boulevard des Capucines, as if someone had started some director’s old film running on the screen of the window.” Gazing at Sam’s dead body, Vera muses that “It was like trying to lay a negative over a printed photograph so that they coincided.” In his last letter, Sam wrote, “I’m bored. I wanted something I couldn’t have, and everything I did get bored me.” For Sam, despite love, “life is the enemy.” For Vera, life is the experience of happiness, a happiness that she defines as that which lasts. Part I of the novel concerns itself with Vera and Sam’s childhood and adolescent friendship: Vera and Sam meet in St. Petersburg when Vera is 10 and Sam is 9 (circa 1911). Sam is Jewish, Vera, Christian. Sam’s father is a lawyer and Vera’s an engineer. From the day they meet, Vera and Sam spend every free moment together. Sam’s world is that of the imagination. He is a fanciful teller of tales and the two children create an almost hermetic world together, one that lasts until Sam’s family must emigrate in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian revolution. Vera remains behind in Petersburg to endure the hunger and scarcity as well as the change in social conditions brought about by the political turmoil of the era. Soon, she too leaves Russia for Paris, along with her newly-wed, tubercular, and soon-to-be dead husband Alexander Albertovich (Alexander’s father was French, although a naturalized Russian citizen). Part II accounts for the love story (if it is one) between Vera and Alexander and the first years of Vera’s life as a Russian émigré in Paris. Part III takes place after Alexander’s death and involves two subsequent relationships: one between Vera and Daskovsky, one of Vera’s beautiful mother’s four former lovers. Daskovsky becomes something of a flawed (perhaps even suspect) mentor or confidante to Vera. A second relationship links Vera and Karelov, whom Vera encounters in the south of France after her also-widowed sister-in-law Lise whisks her away following Alexander’s funeral. Vera returns to Paris a year and a half later, freshly determined to experience, and thus to know, the fullness of life and happiness, She is soon followed there by Karelov, who appears without notice at her door. They resume their affair in what appears to be a blissful state of matter-of-factness. Upon this note, the novel ends.
… (more)
Subservience, resentment, jealousy and infidelity are central to this poignantly tragic Russian novella. The Accompanist is a realist tale with the spirit of Balzac.
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Statistics
- Works
- 69
- Also by
- 5
- Members
- 1,702
- Popularity
- #15,077
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 46
- ISBNs
- 279
- Languages
- 20
- Favorited
- 6
Le premesse sono classiche: una ragazza di umilissime origini non propriamente bella ma musicalmente dotata, diventa l'accompagnatrice col pianoforte di una bellissima e famosa cantante. Presto in lei si genererà un ambiguo sentimento di invidia e di ammirazione che non sarà in grado di gestire anche per via dei conflitti irrisolti con la madre e del suo risentimento verso il genere umano.
L'analisi psicologica del personaggio di Sonečka non mi è dispiaciuta, quello che ho trovato poco originale è la storia e il finale un po' scontato che avrei preferito venisse sviluppato meglio.
Un libro veloce che conferma le mie difficoltà con la scrittura russa...
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