The Loneliness of Exile, Drawn in Exquisite Detail

There is great pleasure to be taken in the appearance of a new book from an accomplished but still too little known writer. Widely read in France and (since the fall of Communism) her native Russia, Nina Berberova published just three volumes of fiction in English during her lifetime, most recently “The Tattered Cloak” in 1991. “The Ladies From St. Petersburg” is the first book to be translated since Berberova’s death at 92 in 1993.

A triptych of precisely observed, deeply felt novellas, “The Ladies” depicts the experience of dislocation brought on by the Russian Revolution at three points: during its earliest beginnings, at its disruptive height and in its aftermath, which turned many Russians--Berberova’s Russians, at least--into emigres who found themselves building new lives in new, unknown cities, as Berberova herself did, first in France and later in America.

According to Marian Schwartz, the book’s translator and author of its excellent foreword, Berberova liked to point out that she belonged to the last generation fully educated in pre-revolutionary Russia. Although the first two of these novellas were written in 1927 and the third in 1952, the sense of a long experiential arc--a haunting, visionary arc--hovers over this volume, especially now as we near the end of a century that has seen Russia so dramatically and so fundamentally remade.

Berberova writes simply, selecting details and images--of landscape, light, clothing, houses--with meticulous care, so that each element is made to contribute to the cumulative mood of loneliness and exile. In the title novella, Varvara lvanova and Margarita, a mother and daughter, set off from St. Petersburg to visit a country hotel run by a Dr. Byrdin. The journey, planned in a time of peace, is undertaken in one of turmoil, yet when the women reach the country, they find it untouched by the uprising in St. Petersburg. “I assure you that all this revolution business will fizzle out very quickly,” Dr. Byrdin asserts. “The Bolsheviks have no chance whatsoever of success.”

Margarita begins as a rather ordinary young girl. She is bored in the company of her elders, and spends her time bickering with her mother and thinking about her clothes and her suitor. Then suddenly her mother becomes ill and dies, and “a tremendous, hundredweight grief [comes] crashing down on her chest, head, and legs.” Berberova deftly turns away from the political and toward a purely personal turmoil as Margarita must commission a coffin, consult with a priest and bury her mother. The young, carefree girl rapidly and painfully matures.

Time jumps forward, and we next meet Margarita years later, accompanied by her own daughter, visiting her mother’s grave in Dr. Byrdin’s garden. All that remains of the house is a handful of charred bricks and six crosses in a row. “In the last seven years she had been hidden among rebels, or heroes, or simply other chance passersby like her,” Margarita reflects, and so the personal and the political are again and lastingly joined.

In “Zoya Andreyevna,” the revolution is in full flow. A large provincial town is teeming with refugees and despair. The map shows the fighting “incredibly, impossibly” close; meanwhile, “in the midst of this Russian exodus, people were still searching for either a lost silence or a lost vividness.” Zoya Andreyevna, it seems, is looking for some of both as she moves into a boardinghouse to wait for news of her lover, who has joined the White Army. In behavior that foreshadows the erosion of privacy that would reach its ugly zenith during the Communist period, Zoya Andreyevna’s landladies, two sisters, spy on her, paw through the vestiges of her finery and extract her personal story. Zoya Andreyevna grows anxious, is stricken with typhus and is peremptorily carted off to the hospital, rather like a piece of broken furniture.

By “The Big City,” the dislocated, unnamed narrator--a man this time--is “a violin, or a flute, or a drum, that fate has been beating on for 20 years. Despair is prohibited.” And indeed the narrator courageously fights despair as he drifts through an anonymous city, a stand-in for New York, to find a job and a room, space both actual and figurative in which to live with his past and his memories.

Gradually he understands that he is surrounded by millions of people who have taken a journey similar to his. Rather like Berberova herself, the reader surmises, he recognizes that “every person brings whatever he can to this big city” and resolves to take part in its life--and once again in his own. In Berberova’s fictional world, dislocation is agonizing and transformative, absolutely, but in time it can also lead to a tentative, and beautifully rendered, sense of location as well.