Product Description

Moura, the Baroness 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 commitment was undoubtedly the mythologization of her own life.

Before Nina Berberova left Russia for a life of exile and became one of the great novelists of the 20th century, she lived in the Gorky household with Moura. In this legendary biography translated into English for the first time, Berberova paints a portrait of the ultimate survivor, a woman who made her life a triumph of fiction. Features eight pages of black-and-white photos.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #443281 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-10
• Released on: 2005-06-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 404 pages

From Booklist
Berberova's Tattered Cloak (1991) is a cherished work of Russian emigre literature, as is her scintillating autobiography, The Italics Are Mine (1992). Her own favorite book was this dramatic, richly descriptive, and historically illuminating biography of a fellow Russian refugee and a woman for all seasons, Moura Budberg, a work just now published in English. Berberova (1901-93) met the smart, tough, and resourceful Moura, a slender woman with a "feline smile," when they were both part of the celebrated writer Maxim Gorky's unconventional household during the turbulent 1920s, and Berberova never forgot the highly influential yet persistently enigmatic baroness. Ultimately, Moura--multilingual, alluring, and invincible--was involved not only with Gorky but also with the daring diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart (his story alone is worth a book) and H. G. Wells. Given the volatile times and Moura's masterful practice of the art of survival, Berberova takes on a complex and compelling tale of political upheaval, espionage, sexual passion, and all the suffering wrought by war, poverty, oppression, and exile, and tells it brilliantly with empathy and panache. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Over the Samovar
You've got to take this one in the right spirit. Berberova isn't a terribly good writer--discursive, disorganized, fatally susceptible to digression from almost any direction. Morever she doesn't seem particularly to like her subject--a failing perhaps more common among biographers than you might at first guess.

So, as biography, not a delight. But as conversation--my, this is wonderful. Stick with it a few pages and let yourself hear the voice: you get the sense that you are in her kitchen, beside the samover, while she rattles on conjuring up ghosts, settling old scores, and generally jabbing the ribs of a whole generation of Russian emigres and their friends.

The "Index of Names" at the end gives you some hint of what you are up against: some 60 pages, perhaps 600 names of all the people who wandered in and out of Moura's life, or cast a shadow over it. Who /did/ this index, anyway? It is a quirky marvel, not quite comprehensive but close enough that you want to keep it around for consultation in reading any number of other emigre works.

Oddly--okay, not so oddly--the dominant figures in this tumultuous cast are not the author herself but two of the men in her life: Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells. And what a pair of gasbags they turn out to be: writers of moderate talent and immoderate self-enchantment, too blinded by the mirror to understand anything about the dreadful world they lived in. Wells once tried to lecture Stalin on the state of the world; Stalin wasn't interested. Gorki actually moved back from exile into Russia, convinced he could make a difference; he died (or was murdered) somewhat the wiser.

The Russians do seem to have a knack for memoir: think Herzen, think Nadezhda Mandelstam, think Trotsky's autobiography. In fairness, Berberova's memoir of Moura isn't a patch on any of these three, not in insight or imagination or literary skill. But it's its own self, and judged on its own terms, it makes a compulsive read.

Not quite the book I had hoped
Based on the book's description as "...a complex and compelling tale of political upheaval, espionage, sexual passion, and all the suffering wrought by war, poverty, oppression, and exile... told brilliantly with empathy and panache.", you might think this would be a fascinating read. But this book wasn't quite the read I thought it would be.

Berberova really needed a strong editor to help her tighten her writing. There were too many people mentioned and the story tended to take so many tangents into other people's lives, making it difficult to get a strong sense of who Moura was.

But you can get a sense of who Moura wasn't. She wasn't a great mom (but to her defense, that was probably the case of a lot of women in her situation), wasn't a great friend, and not too devoted to anyone except herself.

The repeated name dropping made the book frustrating as well. Whether they were in her life for a week or a decade, it seems that Berberova mentions everyone Moura ever met. The index in the back of the book was necessary just to help distinguish the characters as there is little way to keep them all straight.