New Releases by Nina Berberova

En trois journées cauchemardesques, la quête du loisir et du bonheur dans un univers surpeuplé, futuriste, où le rentabilisme est poussé à l''absurde.

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.

Ce livre n’a rien d’une étude musicale — cela aussi Berberova le dit avec netteté —, c’est une biographie. Mais outre qu’elle nous introduit dans le monde secret de Tchaïkovski et de la bourgeoisie russe, à tout instant elle témoigne des qualités narratives d’un écrivain devenu célèbre en quelques années dans le monde entier.

En 1949, le procès Kravtchenko tenu à Paris n''était pas un simple procès en diffamation : il posait en vérité la question de l''existence des camps de concentration en URSS, d''où des débats passionnés et des témoignages passionnants, auxquels assistait pour un journal de l''émigration russe la jeune Nina Berberova. Son texte brille par la rigueur du compte rendu, l''acuité du regard et l''efficacité du style.

Written in Paris between 1928 and 1940 for an emigrant newspaper, Billancourt Tales is about the industrialized suburb of Paris where thousands of exiled Russians, including Berberova, were finding factory work and establishing homes.

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.

En el París de entreguerras tres jóvenes inmigrantes rusas se inician a la vida y toman sus primeras decisiones trascendentales.

A spellbinding short novel set in post-revolutionary Russia about a young girl''s jealousy. The fifth book of Nina Berberova to be published by New Directions, The Accompanist, written in 1936, proved to be a literary phenomenon in Europe where it was first published. A spellbinding, short novel set in post-revolutionary RussiaThe Accompanist portrays with extraordinary sensitivity the entangled relationships of three intriguing characters. Sonechka is a talented but shy young pianist hired by a beautiful soprano (Maria Nikolaevna) and her devoted, bourgeois husband. Maria is everything Sonechka is notglamorous and flamboyant. Her voice brings with it "something immortal and indisputable, something which gives reality to the human being''s dream of having wings." Doomed to live in her mentor''s shadow, the young girl secretly schemes to expose the singer''s infidelities. But as she awaits her chance, the diva''s husband takes matters into his own hands, bringing events to a surprising resolution. This intense and beautiful little novel was published in America almost fifty years after it was written; sadly out of print for a number of years, it is a wonderfully compelling and crucial addition to Nina Berberova''s growing number of published fictional works.

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 greatest collection by one of the great Russian writers is now back in print. First published in Europe in the 1930s and ''40s, these searing, evocative stories by the late emigre writer Nina Berberova (1901-1993) are portraits of the lives of Russian exiles in Paris on the eve of World War II. The protagonists range from housekeepers and waiters to shabby-genteel aristocrats and intellectualsbut all are united in a haunting displacement from their pasts, and all share a troubling uncertainty about the future.

The Ladies from St. Petersburg is only the fourth book by the great Russian writer Nina Berberova to be translated into English. It contains 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 Berberova knew from her personal experience. In the title story the protagonists are taking a vacation, unaware that their lives are about to be irrevocably changed. In "Zoya Andreyevna," an elegant, privileged woman, in headlong flight, just one train ride ahead of the fighting, falls ill among unfriendly strangers. In "The Big City," an emigrant lands in a surreal New York City, a place that is not yet, and may never be, his home.

"Cape of Storms is a shattering book, which opens with a hair-raising scene of Dasha witnessing her mother''s murder at the hands of Bolshevik thugs, and ends as the blitzkrieg sweeps towards Paris."--BOOK JACKET.

A travs de la dramtica experiencia de Zoia Andrievna, que se aloja en una pensin regentada por dos hermanas, en Rostov, creyendo haber encontrado un refugio donde protegerse de sus perseguidores, Nina Berberova sintetiz en este magistral relato lo ms caracterstico de su universo literario: la problemtica existencia del hombre moderno y de las relaciones que establece con el mundo. Sus personajes, sumidos en la decadencia moral del siglo y descritos con una mezcla de crueldad y de ternura sobrecogedoras, aparecen como criaturas de esencia dostoievskiana sometidas a las implacables leyes de una realidad nueva.

A Rostov, Zoïa Andréevna, qui a fui les bolcheviks, échoue dans une pension que les sœurs Koudélianov ont improvisée dans leur maison. La jeunesse et l’origine sociale de la réfugiée, les signes des épreuves qu’elle a traversées et l’état d’épuisement où elle se trouve suscitent en même temps la curiosité, l’inquiétude et la méfiance, car la rumeur, en ville, fait état d’une épidémie de typhus. Or Zoïa Andréevna est prise de fièvres... Ce récit, à la fois tendre et cruel, est publié en même temps que les Dames de Saint-Pétersbourg. Ecrits en 1927, ce sont, dans l’œuvre narrative de Nina Berberova, les seuls à mettre en scène les futurs émigrés au moment où, en Russie, ils fuient la révolution.