Despite her determination to become a poet, Berberova is known above all for the short stories and novels that she wrote during her twenty-five years in Paris. While there are some scenes in her stories and novels of life in Russia from the years she spent there, Berberova did not look back with nostalgia or regret at the country she had left but wrote without sentimentality largely about her fellow Russian émigrés in France.
Berberova wrote short stories (The Tattered Cloak and The Ladies from St. Petersburg are two excellent collections translated by Marian Schwartz), novellas (such as The Accompanist—a disturbing tale), novels (The Book of Happiness is in some respects her most autobiographical), and works of non-fiction. Though herself of the intelligentsia, the characters in Berberova’s fiction, particularly her short stories, come from various walks of life. She described their milieux, including the more squalid aspects, in vivid detail but without judgement. In Billancourt Tales, Berberova adopted skaz as her narrative style, and many of the characters are Russians who worked or lived around the Renault factory in Billancourt, Paris.
In 1950, some years after the collapse of her second marriage, Berberova emigrated to the United States, where she taught Russian at Yale and then Russian literature at Princeton. Initially, she continued to write some fiction and poetry—“The Big City” is one of her best-known works from that period—but became more interested in history, completing two works of nonfiction—Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg and Lyudi i lozhi (about Russian Freemasons in the twentieth century)—to add to her earlier books about Tchaikovsky, Aleksandr Borodin, and Blok.
I am a latecomer to Berberova but have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know her fiction throughout this year. Certainly, she deserves to be better known by English-language readers. It is almost solely owing to the translations of Marian Schwartz that Berberova is accessible to the anglophone world, so we were delighted that she agreed to take part in the interview below.
—Janet Phillips
In a previous interview, you called Nina Berberova your “literary touchstone.” As a jumping-off point, tell us what you meant by this remark. Why was she so significant for you?For years before I met Berberova and discovered her fiction, I’d been searching for a woman writer who embodied the dynamism, progressivism, and high culture of the first quarter of Russia’s twentieth century. I’d spent hours and hours in the Slavonic Division of the New York Public Library reading the “thick” journals of the era, and I did find some fine writers—but never one who resonated with me philosophically, emotionally, and aesthetically. Berberova’s novellas breathe the intriguing atmosphere of revolutionary Petrograd and Russian Paris between the wars. Having been taught to speak Russian at Harvard by a White Russian, I felt an instant affinity for Berberova’s Petersburg Russian. In the end, I didn’t find her at the library. Only after Richard Sylvester asked me to cotranslate Moura with him, and I had a chance to work with Berberova, did it occur to me to ask whether she’d ever written fiction. That was when she gave me her copy of Sentence Commuted and I started translating and publishing her novellas.
With Berberova, I finally began to write my best English. Griselda Ohanessian, my editor at New Directions, demanded my English be of the same high quality as Berberova’s Russian. She made me understand that my goal was not to show the reader how Russian works, not to despair over what Russian does and English doesn’t, but to take what English does particularly well, use the tools in the English toolbox, to recreate Berberova semantically and aesthetically, to make the language of the translation impeccable in the way of the original. Nowadays, this sort of notion is taught in MFA programs, but in times gone by, each translator had to figure that out on her own.
In that same interview, when asked what you have most enjoyed translating in your long career as a literary translator, you cited her novellas. What is it about them that gives you such enjoyment? What would you say is your favorite work of hers?
Berberova herself felt that her best work was the novella collection Sentence Commuted, which mostly coincides with The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories, and I’m inclined to agree with her. I don’t like to think in terms of favorites for an author with such a powerful and abundant output, but I do know that two of her novellas haunt me.
In “The Big City,” the new immigrant is bombarded with visual stimuli from his present and his past. Once he shuts himself in his room (“I wasn’t locking myself in; I was trying to lock the world out.”), he’s flooded with images and colors: “a blue flame fell on the face of my watch. Something orange played with the door lock.” Half the time, he can’t pinpoint the source of his perceptions, which is interesting from a linguistic point of view in that Berberova could have simply used the passive voice to indicate the action without an agent, for example, but instead, she chose to lean on the fact that “something” orange—but undefined—is the cause. I also love the dreamlike, almost hallucinatory description of roaming the hallways of his massive apartment building.
“The Resurrection of Mozart” is reflective of, if not identical to, a slice of Berberova’s own experience in occupied France during World War II, so set much later than The Last and the First, for example. The main character, Maria Leonidovna, may be as close to Berberova herself as any character she ever wrote, especially in the game she invents first for her friends of choosing someone from the past to resurrect and tell about their current plight, because that kind of speculation was a constant throughout her life. I also see her in Maria Leonidovna’s calm but dangerous decision to hide a fugitive musician in their annex, regardless of the danger presented by the Germans billeted in her village. In real life, too, whatever courage or concern Berberova displayed focused on people, not politics. And again, certain scenes are indelible in my mind, like her description of the refugees fleeing Paris streaming through her village.
That said, the individual novella “Sentence Commuted”—so pointlessly entitled “Astashev in Paris” by the original publisher—is impeccably constructed, clear-eyed, and ruthless, the main character too hateful to make the novella itself likable, though some may consider it her best.
Speaking of The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories, one of my favorite stories of Berberova’s from that collection—which left an indelible mark on me when I first came across it in the mid-aughts—is the enigmatic “In Memory of Schliemann,” which is different from many of her other stories in that it is set in a dystopic, technologized future so overpopulated that even a hard-won day of leave at the beach consists of the painful chore of lining up for a crowded swim in the sea. In this story, as in “The Big City,” Berberova scatters glimpses of a transcendental realm far removed from the dreary reality surrounding the character. As her translator—and therefore the person who has read her work the most closely—I’m sure you’ve noticed this aspect of her work. In your opinion, how big a role does metaphysics play in her worldview—as it comes across in her oeuvre?
I love that you’ve made this point. This dystopic, futuristic element only enters into those two stories and makes me think she might have moved further in that direction of speculation on the future if she had continued to write fiction. As much as she obsessed about the consequences for people both real and fictitious, people she knew and people she invented, she shows in these stories that she was ready to speculate about what current trends would lead to and mean for humanity.
Your latest translation of a work by Nina Berberova, The Last and the First, has just been released by Pushkin Press. Why do you think it has taken so long for the debut novel of such an acclaimed writer to be commissioned (in fact, though first chronologically, it could actually be the last of her works to be published in English translation)?
There was no commission; I translated this book on spec before submitting it to Pushkin Press. Had I not taken the initiative, this book would still not exist in English. Perhaps it had something to do with the odd title, which at first even I didn’t understand—but I had never read the book and couldn’t have told you whether it was fiction or nonfiction. That I turned to it at all can be attributed to my love of Berberova’s work, and of translating it, so I was reviewing what I knew remained untranslated, starting with another novel, Povelitel’nitsa (Sovereign? Empress? Mistress?—tricky title), when I realized there was also The Last and the First.
Acclaimed though Berberova deservedly is, she has also been shunted aside time and again, particularly by Slavists, so I’m not at all surprised at the slow pace of her publication in English. However, I am beginning to have thoughts about why this has been the case.
How do you see the place of this novel within Berberova’s oeuvre?
The Last and the First feels like what Berberova had to get off her chest before she could write less explicitly topical material. Unlike almost all her other fiction, it is overtly political, addressing a specific phenomenon, “returnism,” which she lets play out in Paris and Provence, and with a larger cast of characters than one often finds in her stories. The plot revolves here around family groupings, whereas most of her other works focus on individuals, at most in relationships with one other person. Nonetheless, much here comes up in her later work: the even emphasis on men and women who are not stereotypes; the unflinching look at individual miseries; and, of course, the remarkable love for physical movement and delight in the senses.
How exactly have Slavists dismissed her work?
For a long time, Slavists shunted aside virtually all women writers-not-poets on a strict gender basis. Berberova infuriated them all the more when they saw her “abandon” the great Khodasevich (she left him but did not abandon him) and reject the stereotypical role of Great Man’s Wife, such as we know from the wives of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Mandelstam, to name but a few. She was what I think of as a modern woman, and her independence shocked the Russian literary establishment. She was also a woman of firm and firmly expressed opinions, so much so that I was warned before I met her in person that she might be hard on me. She was never anything of the sort, of course. And subsequently I learned that the older women I was warned against tended to be the women I liked and admired best of all.
During World War II, she was accused of collaborating with the Germans, but I have not seen any convincing evidence of this, especially if you consider how zealous the French were in tracking down collaborators after the war (the French never touched her, though she was called in for questioning by the Germans during the war).
To return to what you said earlier, you began writing your “best English” with your translations of Berberova because, at your editor’s urging, you dipped further into the English toolbox to recreate Berberova aesthetically. Can you remember a specific example of this freed approach—which allowed you to produce better writing in translation?
Be it syntax, punctuation, diminutives, or expletives, the translator needs to distinguish between surface mechanics and effect. A language teacher looks in a translation for evidence that the student understands the mechanics of the original; a reader wants to know what is distinctive about a piece of writing. Is it funny? Philosophical? Erudite? Colloquial? To me, a freed approach goes beyond recognizing how Russian and English each delivers standard language and reaches deep into English for a way to produce the analogous emotional, intellectual, social, poetic, aural, visual or any other effect.
For example, take this sentence from “The Tattered Cloak”:
На углу двух замерших каналов, у крутого каменного мостика, я видела: налепла большая афиша: в театре, в двухтысячный раз, идет пьеса Самойлова.
Literally:
On the corner of two frozen canals, by a steep stone footbridge, I saw: a big poster was stuck up: in the theater, for the two thousandth time, Samoilov’s play is running.
As you see, the first two phrases are in Russian, not English order. Also, the two colons are a problem: there are two of them, something English almost never allows. There seems no point to the first colon in English; sometimes in this situation that particular colon can even introduce a subordinate clause. The second functions the way an English colon would, to indicate “and this is it,” which makes sense in English.
My translation:
By a steep stone footbridge at the juncture of two frozen canals I see a big poster tacked up: In this theater, Samoilov’s play is being performed for the two thousandth time.
For another, less straightforward instance, I could cite this same novella’s title, which in Russian is Плач (Wail/Lament/Moan), but through a long, somewhat convoluted, but ultimately productive process, became “The Tattered Cloak.” You can read the tale of this transformation in an article I wrote for Words Without Borders, “‘The Tattered Cloak’: The Story of the Title.”
How do you approach Berberova aesthetically in your translations? For example, do you attempt to reproduce—in English—the style in which her Russian characters would have spoken in Berberova’s time?
I’m not a great believer in translators who say they can write the way someone would have written a hundred years ago. As Walter Arndt once said, “The problem with translating Pushkin isn’t that we haven’t read everything Pushkin did, but Pushkin didn’t read everything we have.” You can’t unhear the last hundred years. The best you can do is evoke the tone of an era. This can be especially hard when the very concept or phenomenon only existed at a specific point in time.
Where is the translator to find English contemporaneous to Berberova’s Russian? In books. A lot of my reading has always been in English-language literature, both nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. To tune their ear, translators simply must expose themselves to a wide range of writing in both the source and target languages.
You knew and collaborated with Berberova on translations of her works in the last decade of her life. What was she like in person?
Berberova had a commanding presence, to say the least, but she was always fair, even kind, with me. The first day we spent together in Princeton, for a work session on Moura, she took me to lunch at the Princeton Faculty Club, drove us to her faculty apartment, pointed to a chaise longue on the grass there, and told me to take a nap. The fact that I did fall asleep surprised her, apparently, because she remembered it and seemed to think it demonstrated some kind of inner calm or confidence. As I recall, I slept because she’d told me to.
Our conversations were always about her books and especially about publishers and publishing. I never asked her about her private life, nor she about mine, though she knew me through my two pregnancies. We were both focused first on Moura and then on her fiction, so that’s mostly what we talked about. That and, to a lesser extent, the people who visited her.
Toward the end of her life, beginning with Glasnost but then especially when she traveled to the Soviet Union, in 1989, our conversations shifted. She was thrilled to see her work published in Russia and retained the Russian rights to her works so that they could be published in multiple editions simultaneously. By then, she had become quite famous in France, a fact she viewed not just with irony but with very real pleasure. She told me, “Marian, I knew I’d ‘made it’ when Le Monde quoted me and didn’t need to identify me.”
But that trip to the Soviet Union broke her. Although she knew perfectly well what had been going on there and agonized over it, seeing with her own eyes what had become not so much of places as of people, especially people she had known as a young woman, tore her up. She perceived the few people of her generation still alive as dulled, diminished. The adulation she encountered there could not blot out the tragedy all around her. She never really recovered.
In her last few years, when I was already living in Austin, we would have long conversations, which I always prepared for in the same way I had when I visited her in Princeton and, later, Philadelphia. She was hungry for interesting and new ideas on any subject at all. I remember once discussing space exploration with her. But toward the end, if I wasn’t entertaining her sufficiently, I guess, or if I’d worn her out, she would just hang up. I always found that amusing.
Tell us about your working relationship with Berberova.
From the beginning, I decided we had to communicate in English because it was the only aspect of our relationship in which I was clearly the authority. Ours was a text-based relationship. I always want to know the motivation behind word choices, characters, locations. I need a clear picture of the author’s perspective, and those were the questions I asked Berberova and the detailed answers she gave. Her English was good enough that we could discuss semantic and syntactic subtleties and she could contribute to my decisions.
In your foreword to The Ladies from St. Petersburg, you commented that, by that point in her life, Berberova “was immersed in history and felt ambivalent in general about fiction, including her own.” What was her attitude towards her own works of fiction as well as fiction by other writers, particularly literature that emerged after she wrote her autobiography?
By the time I knew her, Berberova saw fiction as a poor cousin to nonfiction and especially poetry. She thought highly enough of what she called her mature fiction, i.e., the novellas of her collection Sentence Commuted and “The Big City,” but I think she saw the stories that had appeared in Paris’s Russian newspapers as uneven, some much better than others, some much worse—she was perfectly correct about that—and primarily a way to earn money in those lean years. She was proud of her biography of Blok and wasn’t above boasting of being the first to write about Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality. During the time I knew her she was deep into her book about the Masons (of whom Kerensky was one), their role in the February Revolution, and their subsequent refusal to make a separate peace with Germany during World War I. She very much wanted to get this story out and so wrote Liudi i lozhi (People and Lodges).
As to other writers, she most admired Nabokov, whose work she felt vindicated her entire generation.
The one author Berberova is compared to above all is Chekhov (which is possibly more apt for her shorter fiction than for her longer works). The near-silence on Chekhov’s name in Berberova’s autobiography is, therefore, remarkable. What are your thoughts on that?
Is there an elegant, thoughtful Russian writer who doesn’t get compared to Chekhov? I never heard her say a word about Chekhov.
Maybe because I’ve translated Anna Karenina and Berberova edited the Constance Garnett version for the Modern Library, I find an interesting comparison to Tolstoy, most of all in The Last and the First: Ilya’s vision has an awful lot in common with the vision Levin arrives at eventually. Here, in Berberova’s novel, as in Tolstoy, the land—both their native Russia but also the land of Provence being farmed—is a critical concept. In his 1931 rave review, Nabokov pointed this out in particular:
You would think that to settle in the land of strangers would mean to disown your own forever, to cut yourself off from the last tie to Russia maintained by the restlessness of the nomad. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely in toiling on a small foreign field that the author—or the hero—sees the salvation and strengthening of the Russian soul. For there lies something especially Russian in the very notion of ‘land,’ and by living on that land, by taking to living plainly, by pushing aside the culture of the city, by doing all this you can preserve the timeless way of life of your homeland. Such is the thesis advanced.
Sometimes I think Chekhov gets dragged in because he’s such a great favorite of English-language writers.
Would you agree that there’s a strong sense of place, of the scene, in Berberova’s fiction—even something cinematic? How does her style compare with that of the other Russian writers you’ve translated?
Berberova is a spectacularly visual writer; countless scenes in her stories, novellas, and novels exist whole in my mind. Berberova synthesizes image with the senses and the spirit. Cinema can do that, too, but she achieves a multifaceted intensity a film would be hard-pressed to match.
This passage from The Last and the First is a wonderful example:
There wasn’t a soul on the road at that already hot morning hour. The untouched track of the postal bicyclist who had buzzed by here an hour before lay calmly in the dust. The black fields and the bands of meadows mowed for a third time were empty and scentless, as they are in the fall. Marianna ran tentatively at first and then faster and faster. When she finally reached the main road, she shot off like an arrow down the dismal old boundary path, her heavy strapped wooden shoes pounding. She flew past the stubble-field and skirted the old farm; a dog yelped and wet linens rustled in the wind. She ran as far as the grove and stopped. Something cracked in the branches.
This could be filmed, of course, but the images have so many ideas and emotions attached to them. The reader feels her youth, her physical strength and speed, hears those shoes pounding the dirt road, the dog yelping and linens rustling. Even the meadows’ lack of scent comes across. It occurs to me now that these brilliantly concise but bursting images are done largely without color, so often the handy descriptive tool for writers. Tolstoy used color very judiciously, too.
It would be interesting to hear your views on Berberova and gender, both her ideas on gender and how they do or don’t manifest in the characters of her books.
I can imagine Berberova saying that only the Revolution played a bigger part than gender in her life, but lately my thoughts have evolved toward thinking they might have been equally important, particularly with respect to her legacy.
Berberova herself addresses this question directly in her autobiography:
I must—when I wrote about myself at some point—say that I never suffered from being born a woman. I somehow compensated for this deficiency, which I never felt as a deficiency: not when I earned my daily bread, not when I built (or destroyed) my life with a man, not when I struck up friendships with women and men. Not when I wrote. I didn’t even always remember that I was a woman, and yet still ‘femininity’ was my asset, this I knew. Perhaps one of my few assets. Moreover, I had a good deal of what men have (but I didn’t cultivate it, perhaps out of fear of losing my femininity). There was physical and emotional endurance, there was a profession, financial independence, there was success, initiative and freedom in love and friendship, the know-how of making a choice. But there was also submission to man—with joy. I loved this submission, I sometimes artificially called it forth in myself and it gave me bliss. And there was the search for help from a man, the expectation of advice from a man and gratitude for his help, support and advice.
I will also say that I loved and love the human body, shoulders and knees, its smoothness and strength, the smell of a human being, his skin, his breathing, and all the noises within him.
Like many successful professional women, Berberova cultivated what we think of as masculine qualities, attitudes, and work. But as this passage makes clear, she did not dismiss her femininity. Her forthright stance toward the masculine and the feminine countered the traditional expectations imposed on women. She was dogged in making her living. Her writing was ambitious and not channeled into light genres, humorous tales, or family sagas. She resisted being classed merely as a wife to her first husband, Khodasevich. I suspect more than a few people saw her as a sexual threat, perhaps in part because she had serious friendships with men and women both and was frank about beauty and physicality. Inevitably, Berberova’s progressive attitudes toward gender roles brought disapprobation. Significant and influential segments of the émigré world disapproved of her.
I can no longer minimize, let alone discount, the role attitudes about gender played in Berberova’s career.
There are several stories where the first-person narrator is a man, and in English translation that can come as a surprise after several paragraphs, whereas the gender inflections in Russian give this away much sooner. Did you grapple with the idea of finding other means in English to establish the gender of the narrator at the outset?
Berberova wrote very convincing first-person narrators who were men. Once I was doing a public reading, and at the end a native Russian speaker in the audience excoriated me for never saying the main character was a man, insisting that the reader had lost essential information. I pointed out to her that on the first page, this character shaves. In another story, “The Big City,” the Russian reader knows at the very beginning, from the gendered verb, that the main character is a man. In order to push that information closer to the beginning for the English reader, on the first page I changed “There are attics and basements for people like me” to “There are attics and basements for men like me.” There are ways to bring that fact forward.
I love the idea of the anglophone reader knowing Berberova well enough to refrain from making any assumptions about the narrator’s gender until there is direct evidence.
Berberova’s matter-of-fact comment in her autobiography that her maternal grandfather called her “my boy” is intriguing. What role do you think beauty played in Berberova’s characterization in particular of her female characters?
Berberova thought a lot about beauty in general and understood it thoroughly. Though she always insisted she wasn’t beautiful, I think here she was being disingenuous because she was well aware of how attractive she was; she was vain in the best possible way and took care to maintain her looks throughout her life. In her characters, both male and female, we see an unusually nuanced appreciation for what constitutes physical beauty and serious thought as to the ramifications of beauty for a person’s behavior and reception.
The list of Russian writers you’ve translated is impressively long, and includes both well-known names and many the average non-Russian reader would be unfamiliar with. To what extent have you chosen what you want to translate (as opposed to receiving commissions), and why?
The vast majority of the books I’ve translated have been commissioned. The Berberova publications had a powerful hand behind them (although not the very first books) in Jacqueline Onassis, who felt strongly about Berberova’s work and helped get her to Knopf, but it took Richard Sylvester and me a long time to find a publisher for Berberova’s biography Moura, ultimately published by New York Review Books. Russian literature is so poorly known in American publishing and so little read and purchased, that, sometimes when I find a book I love and think would have a readership, I translate it on spec and then pitch it. That was the path I took for Leonid Yuzefovich’s Harlequin’s Costume (Glagoslav) and Horsemen of the Sands (Archipelago) and Olga Slavnikova’s 2017 (helped by an NEA grant) and The Man Who Couldn’t Die (Columbia University Press/Russian Library). My translations are apparently more convincing than my proposals.
In 2010, when asked “what the future holds for foreign literature,” you answered, “we are finally going to figure out how to publish and deliver great international literature electronically.” Eleven years on, what do you think of the progress that has been made, and how would you update your response now?
I think we have figured out electronic publishing, and as a result, more international literature than ever is available, but the texts themselves are increasingly available because of another recent development: the translation grants being made by foreign cultural agencies. France and Germany have supported this kind of translation for much longer, of course, and thus have helped foster the long lists of books translated from French and German.
The countries that provide the most funding are the countries seeing their literature flourish around the world. South Korea is a recent star in this respect. Before their ambitious program of grants and training, Korean literature was just a blip on publishing’s radar.
Russian literature is being supported largely by the Institute for Literary Translation in Moscow and the Prokhorov Foundation, but although more books have come out, they don’t sell well, are rarely reviewed, and appear even more rarely on prize lists. The contemporary literature receiving the most attention is—and has always been—political, for obvious and justifiable reasons (witness Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize); there seems to be little bandwidth for contemporary Russian literature that can’t be put in a political box.
You say that Russian literature is largely supported by the Institute for Literary Translation in Moscow and the Prokhorov Foundation. Do you think that, as a result, only a certain kind of literature gets to make it into English? What kind of literature would that be?
When the grants started coming, I asked myself the same question, but I must say that I have witnessed no politicization of grant giving. My impression is that writers with oppositionist views now tend to seek grants from the Prokhorov Foundation rather than the (government-sponsored) Institute, but I have no specific information to support that notion.
In your opinion, which Russian writers currently working today deserve a wider international readership?
I don’t think the problem is with the international readership so much as it is the anglophone readership. The rest of the world is reading many more Russian writers than we are. I no longer try to keep up with new writing in Russia and lean heavily on Lisa Hayden’s indispensable blog, Lizok’s Bookshelf, for information about contemporary Russian literature, so I know there are many great writers waiting to be published. Personally, I’m a huge fan of Leonid Yuzefovich, whose Horsemen of the Sands I translated for Archipelago Books. A fine writer of world renown, he has virtually no name recognition here, despite his many prizes, including one for me, the Read Russia Prize for Contemporary Literature, for his historical detective novel, Harlequin’s Costume. Recently I translated an entire book of his on spec, Winter Road, a historical novel about the last battle of the Russian Civil War, which was fought in Russia’s frozen Far East after the war was over but before news of the Bolsheviks’ victory reached them. The book won major prizes but has yet to find an English-language publisher. Brilliant book.
As brilliant as she is, Nina Berberova also isn’t widely known in the English-speaking world. For the benefit of readers who haven’t encountered her work yet, please say a few words in response to the question: “Why read Berberova?”
Read Berberova for original, inventive stories and characters set inside the very specific and, to most of us, exotic world of Russian emigration, mostly in Paris, between the wars, but also read Berberova because of the special qualities she brings to the text as a woman.
One of the reasons the Ferrante novels have been such a success is her female perspective, which puts a whole new focus on a place and a time we’ve read about before, and although Berberova’s novels differ mightily from Ferrante’s, she still opens our eyes as only a woman writer could. We’re so used to Russian fiction written by men, and here we have what is wholly in the tradition of the Russian fiction the West has come to love but is so fresh because of this female gaze.
