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Born in St. Petersburg in 1901, Nina Berberova emigrated to Paris in the 1920s where she led a hand to
mouth existence among other intellectuals and bohemians, writing stories and articles either to pay rent or to amuse
her friends and herself. She and her companion, Vladislav Khodasevich, later described by Nabokov as the "greatest
Russian poet of our time," lived together almost until his death in 1939, and following World War II, Nina moved to the
United States to begin a new chapter.
With her typical resilience and determination, Berberova taught herself English while working as a file clerk
and ultimately became a Professor of Russian Literature at first Yale, and then Princeton University in 1963.
Despite the ironic and poetic beauty of Berberova's
writing, her fiction remained largely unrecognized until 1985, when French publisher Hubert Nyssen of Actes Sud decided it
was time for Nina to receive her due. He reissued several of her works, including The Ladies from St. Petersburg,
The Tattered Cloak, and The Accompanist, which was shortly after made into a film starring Richard Bohringer.
Berberova's fascinating autobiography,
The Italics Are Mine, was also published in 1991.
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