I would like to thank staff members of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, for their gracious assistance. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Beaujour, Alex Alexander, and the anonymous referees of this article for their valuable comments. The epigraphs come from William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980; reprint, London, 1988), 27, and Inga Clendinnen, "Homo Narrator," London Review of Books, 16 March 2000, 9.

1. Nina Berberova Papers, Series I, Correspondence, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. See also Gippius, Zinaida, Pis´ma k Berberovoii Khodasevichu, ed. Sheikholeslami, Erika Freiberger (Ann Arbor, 1978), 19–20 Google Scholar, for the published version of this letter of 17 October 1927, and for the rest of the correspondence between the two women. The translation is mine.

2. Berberova, Nina, The Italics Are Mine, trans. Radley, Philippe (New York, 1969), 250 Google Scholar. Translations from the Russian version of the autobiography, Kursiv moi: Avtobiografiia, 2d ed., 2 vols. (New York, 1983), are mine and will be referred to as Kursiv.

3. Berberova, Italics, 249.

4. Todorov, Tzvetan, in his “Introduction to Verisimilitude,” The Poetics of Prose, trans. Howard, Richard (Ithaca, 1977), 83 Google Scholar, reminds us that “verisimilitude is the mask which is assumed by the laws of the text and which we are meant to take for a relation to reality.“ Clearly, autobiographical memory is limited to a “retrieval of the factual record and linked to the presentation of a public self, if often under the guise of a private self.” Woodward, Kathleen, “Simone de Beauvoir: Aging and Its Discontents,” in Benstock, Shari, ed., ThePrivate Self: Theory and Practice of Women´s Autobiographical Writings (Chapel Hill, 1988), 99.Google Scholar Even Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, with all the overt sincerity of its display of the author's irnperfections, is crafted to counterbalance the vices, acquired as the result of a social position, with the protagonist´s attempts to expiate and explain his sins. The imperfect self is Rousseau's public self.

5. “There can be no doubt she artificially worked up in herself two features of her personality: poise and femininity. Within she was not poised. And she was not a woman.“ Berberova, Italics, 244. On Gippius´s sexual orientation, hermaphrodism, and Berberova's take on it, see Presto, Jenifer, “Reading Zinaida Gippius: Over Her Dead Body,” Slavic andEast European Journal 43, no. 4 (1999): 621–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Olga Matich, “Dialectics of Cultural Return: Zinaida Gippius’ Personal Myth,” in Boris Gasparov, Robert H. Hughes, and Irina Paperno, eds., Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism (Berkeley, 1992), 52-72; and Karlinsky, Simon, “Introduction: Who Was Zinaida Gippius?” in Zlobin, Vladimir, A Difficult Soul: ZinaidaGippius (Berkeley, 1980), 1–21 Google Scholar. In a passage deleted from Radley's translation, Berberova positions homosexuality among other evils plaguing her contemporaries: “My craft (and the life that came about as a result of my craft) placed me among drunks, homosexuals, drug addicts, neurotics, suicides, [and] failures among whom many considered good to be more boring than evil and dissipation [razvrat] a necessary characteristic of a literary figure [literator].” Berberova, Kursiv, 489.

6. Berberova, Italics, 3.

7. Ibid, 4.

8. Fraser, Kennedy, Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women´s Lives from Edith Wharton toGermaine Greer (New York, 1997), 35.Google Scholar

9. In “The Italics Are Mine,” New York Times Book Review, 25 May 1969, Patricia Blake remarks that Berberova, “a life-long enemy of sentimentalism, is evidently possessed of what may most kindly be described as a talent for puncturing other people's illusions” (4). Blake also observes that “the avalanche of repellent personal detail overwhelms all else” in The Italics Are Mine and that the book's title is ideal for “memoirs whose stress and selection have been guided by the ferocious enmities that developed in the closed émigré communities of Europe, rent by every nuance of political dissension. Memoirs are true in the sense that ‘accounts are still being settled'” (51). Berberova's response in her very brief letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review (29 June 1969, 23) does not address the above criticisms but provides a correction of her assertion about Evgenii Zamiatin´s departure from the Soviet Union.

10. As Paul J. Eakin so aptly puts it in Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, 1985): “fictions and the fiction-making process are a central constituent of the truth of any life as it is lived and of any art devoted to the presentation of that life” (5). And a bit later: “autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content, what we call fact and fiction being rather slippery variables in an intricate process of selfdiscovery“ (17).

11. For examples of unfavorable reviews, see Blake, , “Italics“; also Tat´iana Ossorguine, “Kak eto bylo: po povodu dvukh knig Niny Berberovoi,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 31 (1990): 95–102 Google Scholar, and Roman Gul“s Odvukon´: Sovetskaia i emigrantskaia literatura (New York, 1973), 282-90. Soviet critics of the Gorbachev period are much more positively inclined. See Kostyrko, Sergei, “Vyzhit’ chtoby zhit´,” Knizhnoe obozrenie, 1991, no. 9: 216–21Google Scholar; Evgenii Shklovskii, “Utselevshaia,” Znamia, 1996, no. 4:225-26; Aleksei Chagin, “Kursiv vremeni,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 19 April 1988, 4; and P. Palamarchuk in his introduction to Nina Berberova, Kursiv moi: Avtobiografiia, Voprosy literatury, 1988, no. 9:184-86. Also Irene Bin´ardi, “Zhizn’ i knigi Niny Berberovoi,” Za rubezhom, 5-11 May 1989, 22. For a sample of favorable reviews in English, see Birchenough, Tom, “The Last Émigré: Berberova and Khodasevich,” Glas: New Russian Writing 8 (1994): 190–93Google Scholar; Barker, Murl, “Nina Berberova on Surviving,” Selecta: fournal of the Pacific Northwest Council on Foreign Languages 11 (1990): 69–72 Google Scholar; Barker, “The Short Prose of Nina Berberova,” Russian Literature Triquarterly (Summer 1988): 239-54; and Hilda Sherwood, “From the Soviet Union to Princeton,“ Time Off, 1 June 1988, 21.

12. Berberova's accomplishments as a writer were recognized even before the publication of her autobiography and other important works. See Struve, Gleb, Russkaia litemturnv izgnanii (Paris, 1984), 290–92Google Scholar.

13. Nina Berberova Papers, Series II, Writings, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (emphasis in the original).

14. Roman Gul´, letter to Nina Berberova, 16July 1967, Nina Berberova Papers, Series I, Correspondence.

15. Patricia Blake's negative review in the New York Times shortly after the publication of the English translation slowed the process perhaps (only a little over a thousand copies were sold) but did not ultimately prevent the book from reaching many American readers, including such celebrities as Jackie Onassis, whose letter of appreciation is preserved in Berberova's archive at Yale. See Berberova, Nina Papers, Series I, Correspondence. More on Berberova's papers at Yale in Vincent Giroud, “The Nina Berberova Papers,” Yale UniversityLiterary Gazette 70 (1995): 58–64 Google Scholar.

16. Nabokov recalls his visit to the boardinghouse lodgings of a little French girl, Colette, at Biarritz where “there was a horrible collection of chamber pots, full and half-full, and one with surface bubbles, on the floor of the hall.” Nabokov, , Speak, Memory (New York, 1966), 149 Google Scholar. Berberova describes her visit to Bunin´s lodgings: “I entered the anteroom. In the middle of it stood a chamber pot, filled to the brim: Bunin was evidendy exhibiting it out of maliciousness towards someone who had not emptied it.” Berberova, Italics, 259- 60. Gul’ vociferously denies any such occurrence, based on the evidence of people who knew the situation: “Litsa, zhivshie u Buninykh mnogie gody, otzyvaiutsia ob etom ‘perle' g-zhi B., kak o ‘merzkoi i glupoi’ lzhi.” Gul´, Odvukori, 287. According to Gul´, Berberova included the sensational “vignette” out of a desire to settle scores with Bunin who disliked her, had written a biting couplet about her, and knew something about Berberova's pro- German sympathies. In a formal letter of 23 February 1951, however, Gul´wrote die following to the secretary of the New York Literary Fund, I. N. Kovarskii: “O kollaboratsii N. N. Berberovoi s nemtsami vo vremia voiny mne nichego neizvestno i u menia est’ vse osnovaniia polagat´, chto eti obvineniia lozhny i iavliaiutsia svedeniem ch´ikh-to lichnykh schetov s N. N. Berberovoi.” Nina Berberova Papers, Series I, Correspondence.

17. Jelinek, Estelle C., “Introduction,” in Jelinek, Estelle C., ed., Women´s Autobiography:Essays in Criticism (Bloomington, 1980), 15 Google Scholar. events.

18. Janet Malcolm, “The Silent Woman,” New Yorker, 23 August 1993, 148 (emphasis in the original).

19. As Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour aptly puts it: “whatever we may write, on whatever subject, comprises a constantly revised self-portrait that denounces us.” See Beaujour, , “The Imagination of Failure: Fiction and Autobiography in the Work of Yury Olesha,“ in Harris, Jane Gary, ed., Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Princeton, 1990), 124 Google Scholar. It is the complete revelation of the self that the critic implies when talking of “denunciation.“

20. Malcolm, “The Silent Woman,” 158. As Jane G. Harris explains: “The autobiographical act may perhaps be considered a form of mediation between life and narrative or discourse, where the life includes memory, evaluation, and events and where discourse both selects and orders those aspects of the life and thus ultimately defines, reimagines, and expresses the self-image in a new form, in the autobiographical narrative.” See Harris, “Introduction. Diversity of Discourse: Autobiographical Statements in Theory and Praxis,” in Harris, ed., Autobiographical Statements, 10-11.

21. Marc Raeff notes: “In these circumstances, exile or emigration also entailed a sense of mission, beyond the mundane task of mere physical survival. The mission was to preserve the values and traditions of Russian culture and to continue its creative efforts for the benefit and ongoing spiritual progress of the homeland—whether one was fated to return or to die in exile.” See Raeff, , Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration,1919-1939 (Oxford: 1990), 4 Google Scholar.

22. Berberova, Italics, 405.

23. Olney, James, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, 1972), 35.Google Scholar

24. Berberova, Italics, 423 (emphasis in the original).

25. Ibid., 19.

26. Ibid.

27. The painting Berberova refers to is Antonio Pollaiolo's 1460 painting “Tobias and the Angel” at Galleria Sabuda in Turin.

28. Berberova, Italics, 213.

29. “Long ago I stopped thinking of myself as being composed of two halves. I feel physically that a seam, not a cut, passes through me, that I myself am a seam, that with this seam, while I am alive, something has united in me, something has been soldered, that I am one of many examples in nature of soldering, unification, fusion, harmonization, that I am not living in vain, but there is sense in that I am as I am, an example of synthesis in a world of antitheses.” Berberova, Italics, 24. In his review in Odvukon´, Roman Gul’ chose to ridicule this passage for too much “philosophizing.” Gul’ appears to particularly dislike Berberova's intellectual independence, her poetic descriptions of her inner world, and the seeming vindictiveness of some of her portraits.

30. According tojelinek, “the autobiographical mode is not an introspective or intimate one.“Jelinek, “Introduction,” 10.

31. Matthews, William, British Autobiographies: An Annotated Bibliography of British AutobiographiesWritten before 1951 (Berkeley, 1955), viii.Google Scholar

32. Smith, Sidonie notes that “the autobiographical text becomes a narrative artifice, privileging a presence or identity that does not exist outside language.” Smith, , A Poeticsof Women´s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington, 1987), 5 Google Scholar. In this regard one should note the differences between men´s and women´s autobiographies that explain, to a degree, Berberova's concentration on others in her autobiography. Jelinek shows that “women´s autobiographies rarely mirror the establishment history of their times” and that “they emphasize to a much lesser extent the public aspects of their lives, the affairs of the world, or even their careers, and concentrate instead on their personal lives—domestic details, family difficulties, close friends, and especially people who influenced them.” She also notes that the narratives of women´s lives “are often not chronological and progressive but disconnected, fragmentary, or organized into self-sustained units rather than connecting chapters.” Jelinek, “Introduction,” 7-8, 17. Compare this with Fraser's assessment of Berberova's memoir: “The Italics Are Mine is a compendious, digressive book more than five hundred pages long. It is like an émigré's travel trunk, fitted with mirrored compartments and secret drawers and stuffed with all sorts of memorabilia and written forms.” Fraser, Ornament, 45.

33. Berberova, Italics, 438.

34. Ibid., 207.

35. Berberova, Kursiv, 472.

36. Fraser, Ornament, 24.

37. Ibid., 53. In the autobiography, Berberova leaves a “teaser,” perhaps pointing to suicidal thoughts amid the disintegration of her relationship with Vladislav Khodasevich: “I remember one walk along the canal of St. Martin, remember it well, even though I would want to forget it.” Berberova, Kursiv, 400.

38. Berberova, Italics, 31 (emphasis added).

39. Ibid.

40. Radley's translation omits the “bitten nails and a scratch on my nose.” Berberova, Kursiv, 23.

41. Berberova, Italics, 388.

42. Ibid., 19.

43. Berberova, Kursiv, 479.

44. Fraser, Ornament, 23-24.

45. Ibid., 24.

46. Nina Berberova Papers, Series II, Writings,

47. Berberova, Kursiv, 478. The passage is missing from Radley's translation.

48. Fraser, Ornament, 53.

49. Berberova, Kursiv, 486. The passage is missing from Radley's translation.

50. Berberova, Italics, 438 (emphasis in the original).

51. Ibid, (emphasis added). According to Fraser, this passage was edited out of the post-1960s French editions of Italics. Fraser, Ornament, 55.

52. “Predsmertnye dialogi,” Nina Berberova Papers, Series II, Writings, 1. The translation is mine.

53. Ibid., 3-5.

54. Berberova, Italics, 101.

55. Ibid.v

56. In a question-and-answer session at the House of Writers in Leningrad, Berberova says this about the breakup: “Then, at a certain point, I stopped going there—some kind of a misunderstanding occurred between Zinaida Nikolaevna and myself—she was a difficult person.” Mikhail Meilakh, “Ne proshlo i semidesiati let,” Literaturnoe obozrenie, 1990, no. 1:69.

57. Berberova describes the shelling of the house where she and Virginia stayed and connects this episode with an air raid she and Journot later survived in Paris: “And that night when arms roared and shells exploded, we held each other in close embrace out of fear and a sense of the terrible future bearing down on us beyond these nights, I could not then know that in exactly twenty-five years I would again shelter someone at night from falling bombs, seeking always the main wall near which, as is said, it is less dangerous to stand—that my trembling hand would again cover frightened (but this time blue) eyes, so that the one who clung to me would not see, in the violet light that illuminated terrorstricken Paris, death fly, aiming at our roof.” Berberova, Italics, 103.

58. Nyssen, Hubert, l´Editeuret son double: Carnets (Aries, France, 1990), 239–40.Google Scholar

59. “Predsmertnye dialogi,” Nina Berberova Papers, Series II, Writings.

60. Ibid.

61. Berberova, Italics, 339 (emphasis in the original).

62. On “literary wives” and companions, see Charles Isenberg, “The Rhetoric of Nadezhda Mandelshtam's Hope against Hope,” in Harris, ed., Autobiographical Statements, 193- 206; Holmgren, Beth, Women´s Works in Stalin´s Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and NadezhdaMandelstam (Bloomington, 1993)Google Scholar, and Holmgren, Beth, “For die Good of die Cause: Russian Women´s Autobiography in the Twentieth Century,” in Clyman, Toby W. and Greene, Diana, eds., Women Writers in Russian Literature (Westport, Conn., 1994), 127–48Google Scholar.

63. Isenberg, “Rhetoric,” 196-97.

64. Berberova, Italics, 340.

65. Ibid., 347.

66. When I met Berberova in Princeton in 1975, the tag of Khodasevich´s wife was firmly attached to her; if she was not directly introduced as a literary wife, she was certainly “explained” as one.

67. Berberova, Italics, 342. This description is supposed to have been uttered by a “not too malicious wit,” but Berberova concurs: “This was almost the truth.” Ibid.

68. Ibid., 438.

69. Barbara Heldt talks about this in “A Choice of Destiny,” Times Literary Supplement, 28Augustl987, 11.

70. The phrase is Bernard Levin´s. See his “Vividly in the Shadows,” Sunday Times, 21 June 1987, 5.

71. Berberova, , “The Accompanist,” Biiankurskie prazdniki: Rasskazy v izgnanii (Moscow, 1997), 134.Google Scholar

72. Nicholas Shrimpton, “Emperors and Mermaids,” Observer, 19 June 1987.

73. Berberova, “The Accompanist,” 139-40.

74. Lamonte, Rossette, “The Accompanist,” World Literature Today (Winter 1989): 126 Google Scholar

75. Berberova quotes from Khodasevich´s letter: “Vera Nik. has turned into a kind of quiet smiling idiot.” Berberova, Italics, 343. Gul’ sees Berberova's dismissal of Vera Bunin as “a very stupid woman” as a product of Berberova's desire for revenge against Bunin. Gul´, Odvukon´, 287.

76. Nyssen, l´Editeur, 102.

77. Sherwood, “From the Soviet Union,” 21.

78. Fraser, in his recollections of Berberova, notes that even as late as 1988, almost a decade after the appearance of The Iron Woman, “the relationship between the biographer and her subject (who died in 1974) seem[ed] eerily alive and far from simple.” He goes on to say that the ‘Volume on Moura forms a companion piece—a literary-emotional glossary, a dark but invaluable mirror—to Nina's powerful meditation on her own life and times.” Fraser, Ornament, 19. In fact, Fraser's entire piece is structured around similarities between the two women and a (posthumous) competition for first place. Kostyrko, in his review of Berberova's writing, explicitly connects The Iron Woman with “The Accompanist.“ Kostyrko, ‘Vyzhit´.“

79. Berberova, , Chaikovskii. Zheleznaia zhenshchina (Moscow, 1997), 205.Google Scholar

80. Ibid.

81. Fraser notes: “There's an expressive, evil mask of smiling hypocrisy that Nina adopts to speak of traitors. She wears it now to speak of Moura with a rage not present in the book: ‘She lied and lied and lied. She slept with everyone. No, reading again this book, I understand that I have no sympathy with her. She was interesting to me because she had an interesting life. She had interesting men. But I did not like her at all.'” Fraser, Ornament, 60. And in a letter dated 22 December 1980 to George Kennan: “I am prepared, of course, that Moura's family will be critical about some of my facts (as relatives always are) but the overall tone of the book has a certain glamorizing aspect of an early ‘liberated woman’ in spite of her being a terrific liar (and great charmer). Yes, a liar from the beginning to the very end.” Nina Berberova Papers, Series I, Correspondence. The original is in English.

82. Berberova, Chaikovskii. Zheleznaia zhenshchina, 204.

83. Ibid.

84. Ibid., 217.

85. Shklovskii, “Utselevshaia,” 225.

86. Berberova, Chaikovskii. Zheleznaia zhenshchina, 397.

87. Ibid.

88. Ibid., 399-400.

89. Ibid., 393.

90. Fraser, Ornament, 46.

91. Berberova, Chaikovskii. Zheleznaia zhenshchina, 207.

92. Ibid., 574.

93. Ibid., 399.

94. Fraser notes the “talismanic quality of her femininity.” Fraser, Ornament, 36.

95. Berberova, “The Accompanist,” 180.