Nina Berberova

"My dear, close and distant friend" : Nina Berberova's letters to Sergej Rittenberg (1947-1975)

Nina Berberova (1901–1993) almost appears to have lived several lives. First, she was a young writer in the revolutionary Russia. Then she witnessed the hectic 1920s in Berlin and achieved her literary breakthrough in interwar Paris with psychologically finely-honed novels and short stories set in the Russian émigré community. Finally, she went on in the latter half of the century to a career as a Slavist in the United States. She had her eyes on Russia the whole time. As an academic she studied the cracks in the ideological wall and seems early on to have foreseen her return to her homeland. At last, as she approached the age of ninety, she had vanquished the Soviet Union and could go back in triumph in the “revolutionary” year of 1989.