Living in the Present
GOTTLIEB, FREEMA
Living in the Present The Italics Are Mine By Nina Berberova Knopf. 600 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Freema Gottlieb Co-author, "Jewish Folk Art"; contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "Times...
...Her book bristles with remarkable vignettes...
...contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "Times Literary Supplement" At age 11, Nina Berberova resolved to be a writer...
...the eyes spoke, and there were lovely discoveries in the whole person...
...Near the book's end Berberova contentedly contrasts the state of her life in old age with that of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
...Petersburg in 1901, Berberova was soon after the Bolshevik Revolution already part of a literary circle that included Anna Akhmatova and Aleksandr Blok...
...She first wants to be a complete person...
...But as she rightly insists, it is more than simply an account of "famous people I have known...
...The whole "spirit of family," she suspects, is a "civilized" drapery obscuring the confrontation of death, which is necessary before movement, change and growth can take place...
...The others, she maintains, were merely jealous of a country that, at the time, could grow in 15 years as much as Europe in 50...
...If Berberova has not written more or made a larger name for herself, it is solely because she gives life precedence over art...
...Their utopianism, she comments, grew from their inability to face decay and death...
...Despite a constant wish to make life as bearable as possible for herself and those closest to her, when the relationship with Khodasevich threatened her own vitality, she decided they should separate...
...In 1922 she met Vladislav Khodasevich, praised by Vladimir Nabokov as "the greatest Russian poet of all time," and together they departed the Soviet Union...
...Perhaps it was Berberova's distaste for hyperbole and her lack of vanity (looking at an old photograph, she thinks she was an ugly girl) that won her the attention of so many men in her circle...
...The memoir contains many reflections on intimacy: "And how did love begin...
...As for the people she encounters here, she particularly admires their lack of pomposity or self-dramatization—the American "cool...
...Writing about Venice, the scene of several visits, the author happily remembers her first trip there as a young woman with Khodasevich...
...She recalls that, as a small girl, she horrified her mother by suggesting that she and a schoolfriend exchange families in order to learn about each other's existence...
...Beyond ably detailing the exploits of her fellow Russian emigre writers, Nina Berberova has fulfilled her quest for personal growth...
...So it is with her memoir...
...to be cultured...
...From childhood on, Berberova has detested the "nesting" convention...
...in the U.S., however, new ideas often issued from ordinary people...
...Berberova is put off, too, by an affectation common among her parents' generation: romantic melancholy...
...Berberova's indifferent attitude toward the past endows her foray into autobiography with an uncommon sense of immediacy...
...Nevertheless, she concludes, of the times spent in the city she most enjoys her last, alone and working on her manuscript...
...Through outward phenomena...
...Nowhere is Berberova's enthusiasm for living and capacity for change more apparent than in her momentous decision to leave Europe in 1950 and make a new life in the United States...
...Among her friends were Andrei Bely, Ivan Bunin, Maxim Gorky, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Nabokov...
...She indulges in no false nostalgia for history's "artificial charm," nor does she yearn for some Messianic future...
...Now, with the U.S...
...She told him she was still in love, but that she needed to evolve, to be open to all of life's vicissitudes...
...Born in St...
...to be in harmony with herself and the inharmonious world...
...A smile that alternated with seriousness showed on a face, strange a minute before...
...Writing comes fifth in her set of priorities...
...The happy confluence of her European sensibility and the Midwestern landscape lends the memoir the captivated tone of a Wim Wenders movie...
...and to gain a measure of maturity...
...If not, they will become "fixed...
...For her, that final reality is always at hand, but she does not envy the young, as they did...
...She is glad that she has no grandchildren thrusting her into what she considers a limiting grandmotherly role, yet she enjoys the students she lectures to at Princeton and Yale...
...Nonetheless, The Tattered Cloak, a collection of novellas written between the 1930s and the '50s, was brought out last year and warmly received...
...She finds especially grating the vague religious emotion evoked in her mother by candlelight, and by the suggestive Liebestraume moonlight induces in Tolstoy's Natasha, Prince Andre and Kitty, or in Pushkin's Tatyana...
...It all makes exhilarating reading...
...Indeed, although she suffered occasional privations, she never lacked the company of fascinating personalities...
...This is not to imply that she is completely uncritical...
...Love, she and a girlfriend determine, is "one artichoke leaf eaten by two people," but it can often be stifling...
...One characteristic that critics have often noted in Berberova's fiction is its utter lack of sentimentality, verging on heartlessness...
...As a refugee, Berberova may have had little opportunity to publish...
...They lived in Berlin for a while, then traveled to Prague, and finally settled in Paris, where Berberova remained for 25 years...
...it is predominantly her own story...
...As if to confirm her thought, he told her virtually in the same breath that he did not believe in friendship with women...
...But her brand of spirituality results from the strong connections she feels with nature and the world of other individuals...
...A personality, the writer believes, cannot be divorced from the physical being: the smell, the voice, the body, the breathing, the very humanity...
...By one's 40s, she writes, "the emotional anarchy of youth, all the intellectual toying, the prolonged Weltschmerz and the fears and trembling of the quivering creature of the 20th century must become past...
...It is this sense of attachment, rather than any nationalistic or religious identity, that provides a moral basis for her vision...
...She regards solitude as humanity's natural and loveliest condition...
...appearance of The Italics Are Mine, we can see she has satisfied all her priorities...
...the cycle is inevitable...
...For me," she declares, "even my own past is not worth as much as the present...
...She observes that French canons of excellence were laid down by the Academy?all else was subser vient...
...Her memoir records a response to life that I think readers will find inspiring...
...With The Italics Are Mine—originally published in England in 1969 and just issued here—she joined the ranks of memoirists as well...
...And, in fact, she eventually became a journalist, poet, translator, critic, novelist, and biographer...
...All these recollections—even the most tender and most grand—I am ready to yield up for those minutes of life, and not its reflection, when as now my pencil glides over the paper...
...Recounting her drive through Colorado and Texas, she tells how struck she was by the quality of light and space...
...Her peregrinations brought her into contact with a host of prominent Russian emigres...
...When the Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilev, literary impresario of the first Soviet Poets' Union, read her the verse he had written to "the light behind" her, "the two long flames ris[ing] slowly/Like a pair of golden wings," she realized such exaggeration prevents men and women from honestly communicating...
...with] no salvation in old age...
...Rather, she translates yesterday into a sensuous, satisfying experience for today...
...Contrary to the attitude then prevailing among the European intelligentsia, she had no prejudices against America...
...A lover, Berberova reflects, is a stranger, then a lover, then a stranger again...
...Lovers who addressed Berberova as a "goddess," she says, killed her affection immediately...
...Eager to act quickly, before another man might approach her and give Khodasevich the wrong impression (as would have undoubtedly happened), she cooked him a three-day supply of borsht and left...
...Ever understanding, he helped her move into new lodgings and took her out to dinner the following day...
...For many years," she continues, "I used the pronoun 'we'—now as in my youth I go to sleep and wake up alone...
...She enjoys, too, the fact that for her they will never age, simply because she will die first...
...To a fellow expatriate who complained that American pears had no aroma, she tartly replied that in Europe, due to postwar scarcity, there were no pears...
Vol. 75 • July 1992 • No. 9
