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On a crisp September morning, trouble comes to the Gorbatovs' farm.
Having fled revolution and civil war in Russia, the family has
worked tirelessly to establish themselves as crop farmers in
Provence, their hopes of returning home a distant dream. While
young Ilya Stepanovich is committed to this new way of life, his
step-brother Vasya looks only to the past. With the arrival of a
letter from Paris, a plot to lure Vasya back to Russia begins in
earnest, and Ilya must set out for the capital to try to preserve
his family's fragile stability. The first novel by the celebrated
Russian writer Nina Berberova, The Last and the First is an elegant
and devastating portrayal of the internal struggles of a generation
of emigres. Appearing for the first time in English in a stunning
translation by the prize-winning Marian Schwartz, it shows
Berberova in full command of her gifts as a writer of masterful
poise and psychological insight.
Baroness Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya Benckendorff Budberg hailed
from the Russian aristocracy and lived in the lap of luxury--until
the Bolshevik Revolution forced her to live by her wits. Thereafter
her existence was a story of connivance and stratagem, a succession
of unlikely twists and turns. Intimately involved in the mysterious
Lockhart affair, a conspiracy which almost brought down the
fledgling Soviet state, mistress to Maxim Gorky and then to H.G.
Wells, Moura was a woman of enormous energy, intelligence, and
charm whose deepest passion was undoubtedly the mythologization of
her own life.
Recognized as one of the great masters of Russian twentieth-century
fiction, Nina Berberova here proves again that she is the
unsurpassed chronicler of the lives of Soviet emigres. In Moura
Budberg, a woman who shrouded the facts of her life in fiction,
Berberova finds the ideal material from which to craft a triumph of
literary portraiture, a book as engaging and as full of life and
incident as any one of her celebrated novels.
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Anna Karenina (Paperback)
Leo Tolstoy; Introduction by Mona Simpson; Translated by Constance Garnett; Revised by Leonard J. Kent, Nina Berberova
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R496
R461
Discovery Miles 4 610
Save R35 (7%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece, the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, and in doing so captures a breathtaking tapestry of late-nineteenth-century Russian society. As Matthew Arnold wrote in his celebrated essay on Tolstoy, "We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life."
First published in Russian in 1921 and never translated, Andrey
Bely's long narrative poem--considered to be one of the great
achievements of Russian Modernism--is translated to English here. A
poet, critic, philosopher, and novelist, Bely was a leading figure
among the Russian Symbolists, and The First Encounter is thought to
be his greatest work in verse. The poem is autobiographical and
reflects turn of-the-century Moscow with its mixture of entrenched
positivism and new spiritualistic trends, cultural variety and the
upheaval of the time. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton
Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again
make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished
backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the
original texts of these important books while presenting them in
durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton
Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly
heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton
University Press since its founding in 1905.
First published in Russian in 1921 and never translated, Andrey
Bely's long narrative poem--considered to be one of the great
achievements of Russian Modernism--is translated to English here. A
poet, critic, philosopher, and novelist, Bely was a leading figure
among the Russian Symbolists, and The First Encounter is thought to
be his greatest work in verse. The poem is autobiographical and
reflects turn of-the-century Moscow with its mixture of entrenched
positivism and new spiritualistic trends, cultural variety and the
upheaval of the time. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton
Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again
make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished
backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the
original texts of these important books while presenting them in
durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton
Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly
heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton
University Press since its founding in 1905.
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Cape of Storms (Paperback)
Nina Berberova; Translated by Marian Schwartz
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R507
R444
Discovery Miles 4 440
Save R63 (12%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Cape of Storms, one of the great Russian writer's most fascinating
novels, was published serially in 1951 in the Novyi Zhurnal -- and
Nina Berberova herself, late in life, took the old emigre journals
off a shelf and handed them to distinguished translator Marian
Schwartz. Now this forgotten, riveting late masterpiece is
available in English for the first time.
Centering on three half-sisters, Cape of Storms treats a very
specific generation, born in Russia but raised in Paris: a lost
generation, having suffered childhood traumas, and now neither
really Russian nor truly French. The three sisters -- Dasha, Sonia,
and Zai -- share the same father, Tiagin (portrayed by Berberova as
an attractive, weak-willed womanizing White Russian). As the
specter of war looms, and the sisters enter adulthood, each chooses
a different path: Dasha marries and leaves for a bourgeois,
expatriate life in colonial Africa; Sonia studies philosophy,
becomes obsessed with radical politics, and ends a suicide; Zai,
the youngest, an appealing adolescent, flirts with becoming an
actress or a poet. It is a shattering book, which opens with an
absolutely hair-raising scene of Dasha witnessing her mother's
murder at the hands of Bolshevik thugs, and ends as the blitzkrieg
sweeps towards Paris. Cape of Storms is unparalleled in Berberova's
work for its high drama, its starkness, and many shifts of mood and
viewpoint.
Written in Paris between 1928 and 1940 for an emigrant newspaper,
Billancourt Tales is about the industrialized suburb of Paris where
thousands of exiled Russians, including Berberova, were finding
factory work and establishing homes. These fine stories, sometimes
amusing, sometimes sad, portray a wide range of human emotions. All
show Berberova at her very best, as graceful and subtle as Chekhov,
(Anne Tyler).
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The Accompanist (Paperback)
Nina Berberova, Marian Schwartz; Translated by Marian Schwartz
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R339
R252
Discovery Miles 2 520
Save R87 (26%)
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Out of stock
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A spellbinding short novel set in post-revolutionary Russian about
a young girl's jealousy. The fifth book of Nina Berberova to be
published by New Directions, The Accompanist, written in 1936,
proved to be a literary phenomenon in Europe where it was first
published. A spellbinding, short novel set in post-revolutionary
Russia, The Accompanist, portrays with extraordinary sensitivity
the entangled relationships of three intriguing characters.
Sonechka is a talented but shy young pianist hired by a beautiful
soprano (Maria Nikolaevna) and her devoted, bourgeois husband.
Maria is everything Sonechka is not - glamorous and flamboyant. Her
voice brings with it "something immortal and indisputable,
something which gives reality to the human being's dream of having
wings." Doomed to live in her mentor's shadow, the young girl
secretly schemes to expose the singer's infidelities. But as she
awaits her chance, the diva's husband takes matters into his own
hands, bringing events to a surprising resolution. This intense and
beautiful little novel was published in America almost fifty years
after it was written; sadly out of print for a number of years, it
is a wonderfully compelling and crucial addition to Nina
Berberova's growing number of published fictional works.
Now added to the quartet of books by Nina Berberova that New
Directions has presented for the delight of American readers is
this delectable baker's dozen -- The Billancourt Tales. These are
thirteen stories (Berberova called them "Fiestas") chosen from
those she wrote in Paris between 1928 and 1940 for the emigre
newspaper The Latest News.
In her preface Berberova mentions how she found what to write
about through her discovery of Billancourt, a highly industrialized
suburb of Paris. Here thousands of exiled Russians -- White Guards
and civilians -- were finding work and establishing homes away from
home with their Russian churches, schools, and small business
ventures. Berberova thought the significance of the tales was in
their historical and sociological aspects rather than in their
artistry but the reader will demur, for these are fine stories, the
kind that have led to comparisons to Chekhov. They portray a wide
range of human beings and the twists and turns of their various
lives. There is Ivan Pavlovich making a success of his rabbit farm
but procrastinating too long about a proposal of marriage;
Kondurin, happy to play the piano in restaurants rather than
working as a bookkeeper -- his only problem is the restaurants keep
going out of business; and Gavrilovich who loses a job as an actor
in the movies because the scene requires him to steal a lady's
purse and even though it is make believe he just can't do it. All
in all a group of very Russian tales very well told.
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