Nina Berberova

Nina Berberova (1901–1993) was born in St. Petersburg. She and her companion Vladislav Khodasevich, later described by Vladimir Nabokov as the “greatest Russian poet of our time,” lived in the household of Maxim Gorky for some years before emigrating to Paris. Khodasevich died in 1939, and in 1950 Berberova moved to the United States, where she taught herself English and worked as a clerk before becoming a professor of Russian literature at Princeton in 1963. In 1985, the novellas Berberova had written in the 1930s about Russian émigrés living in Paris were rediscovered by Hubert Nyssen, the director of the French publishing house Actes Sud, who began a program of reissuing her works, which include The Ladies from St. Petersburg, The Tattered Cloak, The Book of Happiness, The Accompanist, and an autobiography, The Italics Are Mine.
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