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PARTISAN REVIEW
viewed here was written on the eve of change in 1989, one can already
see the concerns surfacing. Just as the novels of Klima, Konrad,
and
Skvorecky grasp at clear characterizations and plots that compel, they also
reflect the lack of clarity and direction in the societies from which they
spring. This means that these writers are engaged with their cultures,
and
struggling to create meaningful work within them. However, the ques–
tion remains whether or not their work can rise above the confusion
ris–
ing out of the democracies they helped to create, or whether repression
continues to be, sadly enough, the more focusing muse.
Berberova's work, however, seems immune to such flaws, for hers
is
a voice that speaks with the sense of immediacy that comes from living
directly on the struggle's front, rather than in the disarray of the aftermath.
Initially published from the late 1930s to the 1950s, her six "novels"
(really novellas at most) span seven decades, taking as their subject matter
the difficult lives and loves of Russian emigres living in Paris after having
fled the Revolution. Though one character observes just after the war,
"the past, their common forty-year past, was more real than their shabby
and soulless present," Berberova's characters avoid mere nostalgia, for she
never romanticizes the exiles into pure and innocent martyrs. Instead, we
see the cold-hearted behavior of a Russian insurance salesman that leads
to the suicide of a young woman in "Astashev in Paris," or the desperate
scramble for love and security as a woman throws herself at any man she
can find in "The Waiter and the Slut." The result is that, by turning an
unflinching eye toward the pathetic, Berberova captures the real pathos of
her characters and the manner in which their lives seem lived out before
they have even lived them.
"Somewhere there was the rapture of happiness and the tyranny of
fate," thinks a young girl in the book's title piece. Though she thinks it
in
the St. Petersburg of 1920, it's the same thought she experiences later
in
Paris, where in struggling through yet another war, "you had to chide
yourself ... that this was Paris - silk, lace, champagne - not Oboyan or
Cheboksary torn between Whites and Reds, not 1920 but 1940, 1941,
1942, and the earth was revolving around the sun as before."
Nonetheless, rapture and fate are much of what the novellas are about,
"The Tattered Cloak" coming full circle when the narrator is confronted
by a shattered Samoilov, the man who early in life whisked her sister
Ariadna off her feet and eventually to an early death in outer Siberia.
Begging forgiveness, both he and the narrator know there is none left to
give, that too much is past, too many deaths have occurred. Still, it is the
heart's urging that is most real, for despite the melancholy that pervades
her life, the narrator finds that what is "being revived in the face of every–
thing (as it was twenty years ago) inside me might - very approximately
and clumsily - be called a search for grandeur, a thirst for wisdom, love,
