The Ladies from St. Petersburg: Three Novellas

122 pp. Translated by Marian Schwartz. Nina Berberova was born in St. Petersburg. She and her companion Vladislav Khodasevich, a poet. lived in the household of Maxim Gorky for some years before emigrating to Paris. Khodasevich died in 1939, and in 1950 Berberova moved to the United States, where she taught herself English and worked as a clerk before becoming a professor of Russian literature at Princeton in 1963. In 1985, the novellas Berberova had written in the 1930s about Russian emigres living in Paris were rediscovered by Hubert Nyssen, the director of the French publishing house Actes Sud, who began a program of reissuing her works.