The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories

by Nina Berberova, Marian Schwartz, Marian Schwartz (Translator)

Overview

The greatest collection by one of the great Russian writers is now back in print. First published in Europe in the 1930s and '40s, these searing, evocative stories by the late emigre writer Nina Berberova (1901-1993) are portraits of the lives of Russian exiles in Paris on the eve of World War II. The protagonists range from housekeepers and waiters to shabby-genteel aristocrats and intellectualsbut all are united in a haunting displacement from their pasts, and all share a troubling uncertainty about the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811214735
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/17/2001
Series:	New Directions Classic , #916
Pages:	307
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Nina Nikolaevena Berberova (1901-1993) was born in St. Petersburg. She left Russia after the revolution in 1922, eventually settling in Paris in 1925 with her lover Vladislav Khodasevich. She moved to the U.S. in 1950 and taught at Yale and Princeton. In France she was honored as a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters.

Table of Contents

	The Resurrection of Mozart	3
	The Waiter and the Slut	35
	Astashev in Paris	91
	The Tattered Cloak	163
	The Black Spot	213
	In Memory of Schliemann	277

Editorial Reviews

Haunting ... as graceful and subtle as Chekhov. —New Republic

Anne Tyler

A splendid, tragically beautiful writer capable of drawing unforgettable characters ... sublime.

Los Angeles Times

First rate.... These stories are very much of their time, but the years haven't tarnished them...

Newsweek

Berberova ... will not turn her back on he past to re-create herself. She remembers so we won't forget.

Review of Contemporary Fiction

She remembers so we won't forget.
—Context

[W]e are in the hands of a divine master.

RALPH Magazine

She remembers so we won't forget.
—Context

Robert Buckeye

A collection of six novellas, first published in English two years before Berberova's death in 1993. The Russian novelist and biographer (of poet Aleksandr Blok), born in 1901, spent many of her final years as a professor at Princeton, but the stories here are more reflective of her life as an exile in Paris from 1922 through the early '50s, when most of these were originally published. As Kirkus noted in 1991, when Schwartz's translation first saw print (April 1, p. 482): these pieces are "quintessentially Russian in mood and theme." Berberova's émigrés find it difficult to adjust to life in Paris; their past lives compete with their present exile—the tales are peopled with history's victims. Our review commented on the "unrelieved bleakness," but praised the economical telling and the skillful execution. Still, we found these stories "too cerebral" and "too carefully crafted to move."

Kirkus Reviews