Redemption of a Slavic Soul : THE TATTERED CLOAK AND OTHER NOVELS <i> By Nina Berberova</i> ; <i> translated from the Russian by Marian Schwart</i> ; <i> (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 305 pp.) </i>

Nina Berberova has had a long and extraordinary life. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1901, lived in exile in Paris for 25 years, and in 1950 came to America, where she became a professor of Russian literature at Princeton.

Retired since 1971 and now almost 90 years old, Berberova still lives in New Jersey. During the 30 years of her residence in America, none of her fiction (novels and stories written before she came here) has ever been published in this country. She is one of those writers, like Jean Rhys, whose works, long neglected, have quite suddenly been rediscovered by a whole new generation of readers and who is now enjoying a literary renaissance very late in her life.

What happened to her work during these years? How could such remarkable stories, fiction with the mark of genius, have lain quietly undiscovered for so long? Didn’t Berberova ever say to someone, “You know, I have these short novels. I wrote them in Paris in the ‘30s and ‘40s. They would have to be translated, of course, from the Russian. . . .”

In her autobiography, “The Italics Are Mine,” published in France two years ago, Berberova described her childhood in Russia. Her mother came from a family of state functionaries who served the czar; her father, a liberal and cultivated Armenian, foresaw a modern Russia that he believed would be birthed violently. Berberova spent a precocious childhood obsessively absorbed in her writing, which she had come to see as her calling. Anticipating the atrocities of the revolution, she learned to write with both hands, in case one should happen to be cut off.

And she did witness atrocities. As a young woman, Berberova fell in with a group of St. Petersburg writers clustered around the poet Goumilov, who eventually was rounded up and shot, along with 62 others, for being “counterrevolutionary.” “Revolutionary” Russia had come to despise and fear its artists, just as Germany would a decade-and-a-half later, not simply censoring them but torturing them, “disappearing” them. Reluctantly, with little choice in the matter, Berberova became an exile.

She and her lover, Vladislav Khodassevitch (described by their fellow emigre Vladimir Nabokov as the greatest poet of his generation), escaped to Paris in 1922, and became part of what she has called the “miserable, stupid, stinking, pitiable, unhappy, cowardly, harassed--and hungry” Russian emigre world of that city after the Revolution. It was not a fairy-tale transformation for the fugitive Russians--the grand dukes and countesses fallen on hard times, the shop girls in tattered clothes, the starving writers cut off as exiles from the sources that normally would have shaped their language and ideas.

Berberova’s lover died a miserable death three years after their arrival in Paris, unable to afford a doctor or medicine, an event she still spoke of with emotion in an interview with the Manchester Guardian last year. In the warped, harsh environment of Paris, Berberova became a writer, a splendid, tragically beautiful writer capable of drawing unforgettable characters--whores and petty pimps and grandmothers who never leave the Russian emigre enclaves of their apartment buildings, cinema cashiers longing for new clothes, sad characters, bitter and hardened, awaiting the better turn of fate which they only half-heartedly believe in.

They are Jean Rhysian characters in Chekhovian worlds of exile, Kafkaesque people who cannot forget and cannot remember. Their lives are spent battling sickness and cold, searching for an affordable apartment, waiting in pawn shops. They seek money, not for luxuries but to keep an apartment until the end of the month, to buy bread. Occasionally they seek love or it seeks them out, a person to bring the exiled back to life, but it’s to no avail; things are too far gone in this demimonde .

In a world where people are unceasingly nervous about their fates, it’s hard to stay put. The people in these novels move from one place to another--Warsaw, Paris, New York, Chicago. Groundless and melancholy, they won’t make good people of the future, one character notes, because “the Slavic soul lacks any real space-age energy.”

What the Slavic soul does not lack is tragedy. In the brilliant story, “The Waiter and the Slut,” Tania and her friend Gulia imagine themselves “grande amouresses.” Tired of her dreary, poor life in emigre Paris, Tania begins to transform herself, searching for that “Parisian happiness” consisting of “idleness and physical pleasure”--a man with money, in other words, “a man she could hide behind, who would take care of everything, and pay for everything, and give her presents.”

A waiter named Bologovsky, an emigre from St. Petersburg (like Tania herself), looks momentarily promising. Bologovsky, an honest man, blind to her past, a man with an inner life she never sees, falls in love with her. Old and seemingly tedious, he’s in fact full of mute, inexpressible dreams that she will marry him, meet his grandchildren, take up embroidery again; that they will somehow do something brave together and make a life. But later, watching him sitting across from her, “a tiny red insect crawling across his starched chest,” he seems to her “such a comedown, such a terrible retribution, such a speedy path toward theend” that she attacks him, falls into slovenly ways and develops a taste for reading lurid newspaper storiesthat will foreshadow her own violent demise.

To say these novels aren’t really about love, just as Jean Rhys’ never were, is an understatement. They are about the relationship of memory to existence, about life, about the desperate conditions in the world, particularly in Europe, between the years 1920 and 1950. They ask questions: What is this life? How could it deal with individuals so brusquely and cruelly? For what am I living? Why the horror and cruelty in the world--why not the sublime?

The novels themselves are sublime, too complex to reveal the plots of each one, but “The Tattered Cloak” and “Pestilence” hold keys to understanding Berberova. In them, she says, there is both the pestilence of a million years inside each of us, the dark and bitter forces of history and human nature, and there is also the “tattered cloak,” a splendid protective cloak, the garment of homeland and who-I-am.

“We’ve seen a lot. We’ve never been afraid,” says Samoilov to his fellow emigres in the title story, “but a lot more lies ahead of us. We’ve forgotten our prayers and life has stolen away our hopes. Nothing will ever bring them back. You’ve wrapped your dainty feet up in this old cloak so many times, and I’ve draped it over myself more than once, trying to cheer you up by pretending I was Childe Harold of old. Tell me, wasn’t this the cloak Joseph wrapped around Mary and the infant on their journey into Egypt? Or maybe it’s Don Quixote’s cloak? Or perhaps it belongs to the God himself, Cervantes? . . . Or is this the cloak of Lear struggling through the storm we’ve known so well for so long?”

“Only Nabokov,” Berberova said in an interview last year, “was able to fulfill the ambition which many of the emigres held. He was the only one of our contemporaries to belong to both the Russian and the Western world.” But then, she adds, like Strindberg and Conrad, he came to write in a language other than his mother tongue.

Perhaps this explains the long wait behind the appearance of her novels here. It has taken a very long time for Berberova to see her worlds joined. Two years ago she was invited to Moscow, her first visit since 1922. Today she sees the work of her Paris years translated into English. The world shifts, yet Berberova, like Onegin, can say, “All my life has been a pledge.”

It seems fitting that this pledge should have paid off, that this conciliation, and this attention for her extraordinary work, should have come her way at last.