Nina Berberova — writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Nina Berberova was a Russian-American novelist, poet, biographer, and memoirist who emigrated from Russia in 1922, lived in Paris for decades, and was virtually unknown to a mass audience until she was rediscovered in France in the 1980s at age 80 — becoming a literary sensation across Europe.
Tracing the roots — St. Petersburg
Born in St. Petersburg in 1901 and leaving Russia with her partner Vladislav Khodasevich in 1922, Berberova spent her exile years in Paris writing novels, biographies of Tchaikovsky and Borodin, and her extraordinary memoir The Italics Are Mine. She represents the Russian émigré literary tradition at its most elegant.
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St. Petersburg. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"We carried Russia in us like a wound."