Berberova, Nina (1901-1993), was a Russian writer who gained recognition late in her life. She wrote poems, novels, and short stories as well as biography, memoirs, criticism, and reviews. Berberova felt that life was not entirely a matter of free will or conscious choice and that, sometimes, forces outside human control shaped lives. These forces of fate could be psychological or biological. Berberova believed that this realization was not to be taken as a surrender; rather, life must be lived in a conscious, chosen way, and not passively experienced. Her fiction often underlines the difference between a life of endurance and bare survival and one of self-knowledge and action.
Berberova belonged to the generation of Russian artists, writers, and intellectuals who fled Russia following the October Revolution of 1917 in an atmosphere of increasing repression. This generation included the novelists Vladimir Nabokov and Maxim Gorki, as well as Berberova’s first husband, the poet Vladislav Khodasevich. In 1922, Berberova went first to Berlin and then, in 1925, to Paris, where she lived for 25 years. In 1932, she left Khodasevich and in 1935 married Nikolai Makeyev, a journalist. In Paris, she made her living as a journalist, but it was during these years that she wrote the novels and stories upon which her reputation rests. She also wrote articles and biographies on Russian artists, including the poet Alexander Blok and the composers Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky and Alexander Borodin. In 1950, Berberova moved to the United States, where she eventually became a lecturer in Russian literature at Princeton University.
Most of Berberova’s fiction was translated into English late in her life. Her major works include The Resurrection of Mozart, The Waiter and the Coquette, and Astashev in Paris (all 1990), The Cloak, The Black Pestilence, and The Comb (all 1991), The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories (1992), and a short story, The Accompanist (1988), which was made into a movie in 1993. Before the publication of her fiction, Berberova’s best-known work was her biography, The Italics Are Mine (1969).
Nina Nikolaevna Berberova was born on Aug. 8, 1901, in St. Petersburg to an Armenian father and a Russian mother. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1917, she left the St. Petersburg high school where she had been studying and accompanied her family to Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia. She studied at Rostov University for a year, after which she returned to St. Petersburg until going into exile in 1922. Near the end of her life, she received a number of honors, including an honorary degree from Yale University in the United States and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the government of France. Berberova died on Sept. 26, 1993.
