Nina BerberovaRezensionen

Non so bene perché, ma sul finire dell’estate mi è venuta una gran voglia di leggere una biografia di Čajkovskij: cercando informazioni in merito, sono incappata ne Il ragazzo di vetro di Nina Berberova, uscito per la prima volta a Berlino nel 1936 e suscitatore di scalpore per il suo raccontare esplicitamente dell’omosessualità del musicista russo.

La mia curiosità era destata e la biblioteca aveva riaperto dopo le ferie estive: eccomi quindi qua a scrivervi le mie impressioni.

In generale, è stata una bella lettura. Nel raccogliere informazioni, Berberova ha potuto anche mettersi in contatto con persone che avevano conosciuto Čajkovskij e registrare quindi la loro testimonianza diretta: non si può dire quindi che non sia una biografia ben documentata. Tuttavia, ci sono molte parti parecchio romanzate che fanno un po’ strano, sebbene letterariamente funzionino molto bene (e in alcuni casi sono commuoventi da smuovere i sassi).

A parer mio è un libro da leggere con la consapevolezza che si tratta di una biografia storica: interessante come documento storico, un po’ meno se cercate una biografia rigorosa di Čajkovskij. Anche l’omosessualità non viene trattata con l’apertura che oggi potete trovare nel Tchaikovsky Research, per dire, ma se ne apprezza comunque la testimonianza storica.

Se la vita di Čajkovskij stuzzica la vostra curiosità e la sua musica vi piace, magari potete iniziare ad approfondire da Il ragazzo di vetro, che per me può essere una buona base di lancio per addentrarsi nella comprensione del musicista.

Une difficile renaissance, une quête ou un vagabondage ? Veuf, Evguéni Petrovitch erre tristement dans ce tout petit livre à la détresse nostalgique.

Comme un instant de mélancolie de Paris à Chicago

Non ho capito bene l'intento dell'autrice perchè il significato di questo romanzetto resta per me un po' sospeso.
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...

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.½

En 1922, Nina Berbérova abandonó Rusia e inició un exilio que la llevaría a varios países europeos (Alemania, Checoslovaquia, Italia, Francia) y a Estados Unidos, donde falleció en 1993. Poeta, novelista, ensayista, periodista, biógrafa, gran parte de su obra gira en torno a la vida de los exiliados rusos en Europa. Una buena muestra de su maestría literaria es La acompañante, novela corta que se publicó en 1935 y cuya traducción al francés, que apareció cinco décadas después, cuando la autora contaba ochenta y cuatro años, supuso su reconocimiento internacional.
Ambientada en San Petersburgo, Moscú y París, entre otras ciudades, La acompañante explora la ambivalente relación que se establece entre Sonia, la hija ilegítima y poco agraciada de una humilde profesora de música, y María Trávina, una diva rebosante de talento y belleza. En el San Petersburgo de 1919, asolado por el hambre y la miseria, la joven y tímida Sonia se convierte en la acompañante al piano de la ambiciosa soprano, a quien seguirá hasta París en el camino de esta última hacia el estrellato, que nada ni nadie parece capaz de detener. Torturada por la admiración y la envidia, Sonia buscará la manera de «hacer justicia» por la desigual suerte que a una y a otra les ha tocado, movida por la obsesión de encontrar el punto débil de la aparentemente perfecta Trávina.

Rivedersi dopo che lui, causa guerra, se ne è andato lontano (ma non era obbligato). Lei ama ancora, lui – nel frattempo catturato da una moglie virago – non si capisce. Addio definitivo a Venezia (...come è triste Venezia, Charles Aznavour) per decisione di lei (era ora!). Testo per me insignificante anche se indubbiamente ben scritto (poetico??). Brevità non dovrebbe essere sinonimo di irrilevanza. Si salva solo la definizione e l’utilizzo della nozione di no man’s land, lo spazio della vita di ciascuno in cui si è totalmente padroni di se stessi: “c’è una vita visibile a tutti, e ce n’è un’altra che appartiene solo a noi, di cui nessuno sa nulla (…) l’uomo di tanto in tanto sfugge a qualsiasi controllo, vive nella libertà e nel mistero (..)” (pp. 36-37). Un po’ poco, comunque. Per una storia di passione al femminile, altrettanto breve ma molto più pregnante rivolgersi ad Annie Ernaux, Passione semplice.

A través del estudio exhaustivo de la inmensa correspondencia privada de Piotr Igor Chaikovski (1840-1893) se compone este Autorretrato del gran compositor ruso. La riqueza literaria, filosófica, religiosa y artística de Chaikovski se despliega ante el lector sumergiéndole en toda la complejidad de su faceta artística. Alexandra Orlova analiza en profundidad la posición del compositor ante el entorno musical ruso de la época; sus opiniones críticas sobre figuras de la talla de Bach, Brahms, Mozart, Wagner; su actitud ante los problemas de la creación sinfónica y operística, todo ello sobre el telón de fondo de una vida marcada por la intensidad de sus experiencias emocionales y vitales. La lectura de este libro definitivo pone de relieve la talla del gran compositor y rebate su afirmación de que 'sólo una cosa me interesa en la vida: el éxito de mis composiciones'.

Étrange ouvrage, à la fois mémoires et essai documenté. Était-elle un personnage porté par une (grande) époque ou un grand personnage? On en retient surtout la figure aimable, naïve et tragique de Gorki, ainsi que le lent déclin de Wells.½

Il tema comune ai diciannove racconti riuniti nel volume è la melanconia, l'assenza di amore o la presenza di un amore privo di contorno, fragile e labile. Il senso di spaesamento dei personaggi, esiliati dalla Russia come l'autrice, le difficoltà quotidiane dei proletari e quella ricchezza così precaria di coloro che sono riusciti a emergere, tutto viene ricondotto ad un senso fatale della perdita e della solitudine.

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.

Subservience, resentment, jealousy and infidelity are central to this poignantly tragic Russian novella. The Accompanist is a realist tale with the spirit of Balzac.

Berberova, Nina. The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels. Translated by Marian Schwartz. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

The Tattered Cloak is one of six novels in Berberova's book of the same name. Well, she calls them novels. Each story is under 100 pages so 'novella' might be a better description. The six stories are as follows (with my favorites being the first two),

"The Resurrection of Mozart" ~ the coming of World War II
"The Waiter and the Slut" ~ one woman's tragic effort to stave off loneliness and growing old
"Astashev in Paris"
"The Tattered Cloak"
"The Black Pestilence" and,
"In Memory of Schliemann"

All stories are written in that traditional stark Russian way. Most of the stories leave you hanging in that, "and then what happened?" kind of way. For example in "The Resurrection of Mozart" the reader is left asking did they escape the war or did they wait too long?½

L'opera della Berberova riunisce tutte le voci di quella generazione russa che scelse di fuggire alla Rivoluzione bolscevica e si volse verso il difficile esilio nelle città europee. Come la Cvetaeva, come Nabokov, come Marai anche la Berberova esprime lo sradicamento dalla patria e dalla cultura russa, lo smarrimento in una società profondamente diversa, i ricordi della vita “di prima”, la ricerca affannosa dei propri simili. Il breve romanzo, o forse meglio dire, racconto lungo, narra di un amore che viene spezzato non dalla guerra né da difficoltà pragmatiche, ma dalla assenza di libertà, una assenza imposta e passivamente accettata. Vi sono al mondo infatti due categorie di persone: coloro che costruiscono il proprio destino e coloro che lo accettano supinamente, incapaci di opporsi alle scelte altrui, alle piccole deroghe concesse con carità ipocrita. Bellissime pagine che nella costruzione narrativa semplicissima si rivelano di grande intensità.

wonderful film with lovely singing, including nuits d'ete by Berlioz½

Берберову вообще читать очень приятно. У нее плавный, богатый, красивый язык. А в случае с "Чайковским" мне в очередной раз повезло, потому что это еще одна биография, где автор любуется своим персонажем, а не просто описывает какие-то жизненные факты.

Чайковский у Берберовой настолько живой человек, что местами его присутствие ощущается где-то совсем рядом. Его боль физически ощутима, его творческое нетерпение побуждает творить самому. Он у Берберовой настолько объемен как человек и как композитор, что этот законченный образ хочется поставить на полку под стеклянный колпак и любоваться, любоваться, любоваться...

Я получила огромное удовольствие от прочтения этой книги.

Poignant tale of a melancholy Russian woman pianist who lives in the shadow of the passionate diva who employs her. More a long short story than a novel, "The Accompanist" is set in chaotic Russia following the 1917 revolution, and in a gray and wintry interwar Paris.

"The Accompanist" was originally written in Russian by emigré Nina Berberova (1901-1993) in 1936. The text was neglected for many years, then was translated and published first in French, then English, in the late 1980s.

Altough the title is "The tattered Cloak" and other novels, I view these much more as short stories. The stories area all somewhat depressing, why are we living?, how do we eke by?, what is the point? Although mostly set in cities (like Paris and NYC) the stories revolve around emigree ghettos, so are really much more like village stories - they remind me a lot of some of the novelllas and shorter works of Gabriel barcia Marquez.½

This book reads like a history text book. It hardly delves into the feelings, passions, fears and fumbles of these fascinating people. The history, however, is clearly written and replete with purges, assassinations, successful and unsuccessful spying, much friendship and many lies. I am a big fan of Berberova's fiction and her autobiography, and was not disappointed with this book. If you want to follow a fascinating and troubling life, go for it. You will feel like you are really there with them all.

The inner conflicts of a russian émigré pianist working for a famous lirical singer, and their friendship-envy-hate relationship amid the lonelyness of exile life in 1920s Paris. When this novel was first published in french translation, in 1985, it achieved for the author instant (although, considering she was born in 1901, rather belated) recognition as one of the greaters russian writers of the century.

Another book for a RL book group. I have to say that short stories or novellas, are not for me.

I find the shorter form frustrating. There isn't enough background detail to make the characters real, and their short time on stage seems too abrupt to develop a story. I don't really know what is going on, and more importantly, I don't care.

The characters were flat and one dimensional, and the stories were undeveloped and uninteresting.

The first novella was of 2 women, mother and semi-grown daughter, going on vacation, at the start of the revolution, which looked to some as a minor disturbance that would soon be pacified. Of course it wasn't. The mother dies, and the daughter is bereft, and now must accept a marriage proposal that she might not have, if the mother lived. Who cares ?

The second novella is about a formerly rich woman, Zoya, who is well educated. She uses her education to land a decent job. Her institute is evacuated because of the fighting in their former city. She doesn't flaunt her past, but it is obvious from her manner and her ragged belongings that she is a woman of quality. She ends up boarding with lower class, human pigs. They are coarse, uneducated, greedy, grasping, and full of hate for anyone who has or is better than they are. They don't wish to become better, they only want to destroy those who are. Zoya becomes ill, and unable to look out for herself or protect or defend herself from those she boards with. They throw her into a cab to dump her at the hospital, hoping that she will suffer and die.

The last novella is actually the best. A refugee man comes to a new large city (NYC), and tries to understand, fit in, and make a life for himself. In his journey he finds an apartment in his building that houses a mysterious man who offers friendship. The man also has magical binoculars that not only show the current time and places, but the past as well. The refugee feels that he can connect his past to his current life. He also discovers that the city has many unexpected sights and events.

This book was translated and it read well, and flowed smoothly. One of the issues is you are never sure if the translation sucks the life out of the stories or not. There is a foreword by the translator, she actually knew the author and tries to present her intentions faithfully. Still I am not sure it succeeded for me. I am not Russian, and nothing in these pages says Russian to me, except the names.

Fascinating life, but poorly executed biography. Baroness Budberg (1892-1974) was a survivor of the Russian Revolution and an enchanting woman who was successively the mistress/companion of Robert Bruce Lockhart, Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells. Nina Berberova knew Moura personally, as well as most of the main personages of Russian emigre life, but this book presumes such a wide knowledge of 20th century literature and politics that most readers will be left rather in the dark about several key events and individuals.

There's a great book to be written about this interesting muse and lover, but this isn't it.½

It’s not only its 600 pages that give this autobiography of Russian writer Nina Berberova its weight – it’s the span of history that it covers. Born in 1901 and raised in St. Petersburg, Berberova experienced some of the worst events that the 20th century had to offer: the Russian Revolution and her subsequent expulsion from Russia with her husband, Russian poet Khodasevich, living a life of poverty in Paris, then enduring the German invasion and occupation of France in World War II. While this book is packed with tales of Russian Literary giants of that era, Berberova is careful to steer clear of gossip and trash-talk, to the point that this autobiography sometimes reads as dry as a chronology of who worked when and where on what. This book is at its best in the first half when Berberova graces us with her innermost thoughts and fears. After her decision to leave Khodasevich, she becomes so guarded about protecting the details of her subsequent relationships and marriages, and even what truly lead her to abandon France for America in the 1950’s, that this reader was left wondering why Berberova chose to write the second half of this autobiography at all. The Italics are Mine supplies a wealth of information about Berberova’s generation of exiled Russian writers, but if you are looking for dirt about the supposed affair between Berberova and Nabokov or other such juicy details, you will be sorely disappointed.½

This collection of three novellas from Nina Berberova may be slim in size and seem spare in narrative, but its soul is deep, dark and Russian through and through. Each novella is set in the early twentieth century and begins with an arrival. In the title story, “The Ladies from St. Petersburg,” a mother and daughter arrive for a vacation in the Russian countryside, but the mother dies suddenly and the upheaval the Revolution has caused in this village complicates her burial. In “Zoya,” a young woman flees from revolutionary violence in Kharkov only to land in a less-than-welcoming boarding house filled with hostile, suspicious women. When Zoya falls ill, she becomes a burden they cannot rid themselves of fast enough. And finally, in “The Big City,” we have one of Berberova’s final stories; it was written in 1952 and set in New York City. A man arrives in New York from Russia with little money or prospects. He finds an attic room in a tall apartment building to call home. In a moment of what reads like magical realism, he searches through the maze of hallways in his building for an old man who has turpentine to remove a paint stain from his trousers only to discover an alternate layer of streets, businesses, dwellings, and inhabitants, a whole interior city within his building. Unlike Berberova’s other works, the Russian roots of this protagonist remain a shadow that retreats behind thick clouds of the surprising and the surreal. In all three novellas in “The Ladies from St. Petersburg,” arrivals are really points of departure and, until death intervenes, there is no such thing as a final destination.