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THE ITALICS ARE MINE Born in St Petersburg in 1901, Nina Berberova left Russia at the age of twenty-one to live in Paris, where she lived until 1950. She then moved to the United States, where she was a lecturer in Russian literature at Princeton University. She is the author of a collection of novellas, The Tattered Cloak, published by Vintage in 1992. She died in September 1993. BY NINA BERBEROVA The Tattered Cloak & Other Novels The Revolt The Accompanist The Italics Are Mine Nina Berberova The Italics Are Mine VINTAGE 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA London Melbourne Sydney Auckland Johannesburg and agencies throughout the world Published by Chatto & Windus Ltd, 1991 Vintage edition 1993 2468 10 9753 1 © Nina Berberova 1969 Translation copyright © Philippe Radley 1969 PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This translation was first published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in the US in 1969. It was published in the UK by Longmans in the same year. The original Russian edition of this book (Russian title Kursiv Moi) was published in 1972. For this edition, Philippe Radley’s translation has been extensively revised, incorporating some new material that was included in the French edition, C’est Moi Oui Souligne, first published by Actes Sud in 1989. The right of Nina Berberova to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman, Reading, Berkshire ISBN 0 09 933871 8 CONTENTS PART ONE The Nest and the Anthill Grandfather Oblomov and Grandfather Prospero. My father. Search for a profession at ten. School. St. Petersburg before and during World War One. My first contact with poetry and poets. 1 PART TWO Poor Lazarus February Revolution. October Revolution. Tsar, Kerensky, Lenin. Poetry. Graduation day. Moscow, 1918. South of Russia, 1919. The Union of Poets in St. Petersburg, 1921. Blok’s funeral. Gumilev’s last days. Khodasevich and I. Expatriation. 75 PART THREE Tobias and the Angel Andrey Bely in Berlin and some unpublished information. Our three years with Gorky. Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Roman Jakobson, and others. The mystery of Gorky’s death. Russian émigré life in Paris in the roaring 20s. An S.O.S. from behind the iron curtain. 149 PART FOUR The Salt of the Earth Literary life of Russians in Paris. Merezhkovsky, Gippius, Bunin, Zaitsev, Remizov, Zamiatin. Literary ‘salons’, periodicals, groups. The ‘young’ generation. Aleksandr Kerensky. Russian Freemasonry. Vladimir Nabokov in the 1930s. 237 PART FIVE ‘Those Proud Figures on the Prows’ Russian ‘masses’ in Paris: Russian churches, schools, fraternities, delicatessen, and bars; criminal statistics and French courts. Modem literature and the émigrés. The assassination of the French president. My second marriage. Death of Khodasevich. Olga. 323 PART SIX The Black Notebook Longchêne, a French hamlet. France under German occupation. The German-Russian war. A visit to the Gestapo. Disintegration of the Russian émigré intelligentsia. August 1944. Stockholm and Brussels. 381 PART SEVEN Not Waiting for Godot My last year in Europe. The Kravchenko lawsuit. A poète maudit Russian style. Sailing to the U.S.A. Seven jobs in seven years. Crossing and recrossing America. Visits to Europe and the ‘mutation of my ideals’. Encounter with Anna Akhmatova in Paris, 1965. Ehrenburg. The meaning of all that was. 451 WHO IS WHO 533 INDEX 593 If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak then to me. - Macbeth, 1:3 PART ONE The Nest and the Anthill I WOULD LIKE TO WARN THE READER: THIS BOOK is about myself, not about other people; an autobiography, not a set of memoirs, not a collection of portraits of famous (or not so famous) contemporaries, and not a series of vignettes. It is the story of my life, and in it I loosely follow the chronological order of events and uncover my life’s meaning. I loved and love life and love the meaning of life almost as much. I will speak more about myself than about other people. My mind lives in the past as memory and in the present as my awareness of myself in time. There may be no future at all, or it may be brief and meaningless. This I have to face. The tale of my long life has a beginning, a middle, and an end. As it unfolds it will become clear where I see its interest and its value. With no deliberate effort on my part, the meaning of life will unfold, the meaning of my life, or, indeed, of every life. This meaning will never be put before life itself to obstruct it; it will creep into the tale and coexist with time and space, and other things which are on the same level for me as the air (of two hemispheres) I breathe. I will speak of things that were essential to me: ‘knowledge of oneself, liberation of oneself, revelation of oneself, maturity that grants the right to this revelation, and solitude in an anthill, which has always been for me something more appealing than solitude in a nest. Of the three possibilities, living for the future life, living for future generations, or living for the present moment, I very early chose the third, the ‘most ferocious immanence’, in Herzen’s words. In some ways I developed prematurely but I learned to think very late. This is my main shortcoming: I was so determined not to lose time that I often did the wrong thing. Not losing time has been my permanent concern since I was three years old, when it dawned on me that time is the warp of life, its very fabric, something that you cannot buy, trade, steal, falsify, or obtain by begging. Not to lose time - for what? For coming to know oneself, understand one’s human condition, and learning to think about it. I never could look into anyone as intensely as I could into myself. And I have not met anyone who could look more intensely into me than I myself can. Know thyself — this has always been a rule of my life, one that appeared in my consciousness before I can remember. Know not so much men in general, nor people, nor friends, but above all know thyself. I remember very well how I first learned that the earth is round, or that adults were at one time children, or that my father was not a Russian. I cannot, however, remember when I started looking into myself. In childhood and after fifty this was quite intense. Between my twentieth and thirtieth years it slowed down; there was obviously not much time for it. As I look into myself today, I see among other things some events, thoughts, and 10