4 ideas
In 1922 Berberova, then twenty-one, left Soviet Russia with the poet Vladislav Khodasevich. They moved through Berlin and stayed with Gorky in Sorrento before settling in Paris in 1925, where they lived in poverty among émigré writers. She left him in 1932 but remained close until his death in 1939, and she portrays him as a major poet whose gift withered once he was cut off from Russia.
Berberova rejects the émigré habit of nostalgia and self-pity and treats being uprooted as a chance to invent herself. Those who lived facing backward toward a lost Russia froze in place, while those who accepted the break could adapt, learn new languages and remake a life. Her own evidence is her move to the United States in 1950, in her late forties and with almost no money, which led to a second career as a professor at Yale and Princeton.
The Russian émigré writers of interwar Paris were cut off from their home audience and ignored by the French culture around them. They wrote for a shrinking circle of exiles and survived on small émigré newspapers and journals. Berberova shows how this readerless condition bred isolation, bitter feuding and quiet creative starvation, especially among the younger 'unnoticed generation' of émigré writers.
In the mid-1920s Berberova and Khodasevich lived in Maxim Gorky's household in Sorrento, where Moura Budberg was also a central figure. Berberova watched Gorky waver between independent exile and the Soviet regime that courted him. He later returned to the USSR for good, which she presents as a case study in how comfort, vanity and political pressure can pull an artist back to a system he once criticized.