The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Billancourt Tales by Nina Berberova
David Andrews

Nina Berberova. Billancourt Tales. Trans. and intro. Marian Schwartz. New Directions, 2001. 175 pp. $24.95.

Nina Berberova’s Billancourt Tales comprises thirteen slender, artful stories of emigré life as played out in Billancourt, a Russian suburb of Paris, during the 1920s and early thirties. Nabokov’s biographer, Brian Boyd, has dubbed Berberova “the most important novelist other than Nabokov himself to emerge in the emigration”—an apt coupling, considering that Berberova’s stories share striking affinities with the Russian master’s stories of the emigration. But the tales bear Chekhov’s stamp as well, particularly in their unremitting pessimism. Nearly every story ends bleakly, a fact that Grisha, the recurring narrator, ties to the fate of the Russian emigration generally. But this fatalism hardly detracts from the delicacy and seductiveness of Berberova’s early work. As Marian Schwartz explains, Berberova, convinced that her later fiction was more mature stylistically, “came to view her Billancourt ‘fiestas’ as of purely sociological interest,” but this is to judge these pieces too harshly. Berberova’s writing is spare, ironic, and lucid, which throws her characters into greater relief. There is the old woman who longs to see her first love one last time—and does. There is the man who throws his wife out, then spends his days waiting for her to crawl back—only to discover that she has died. Another man, tired of traveling but pining for companionship, gets engaged to an enigmatic young woman but loses her when he fails to follow her to America. Many of these stories are romances, with the emphasis on male loneliness. This motif derives from the setting. Many Billancourt emigrés worked in the Renault factory; deemed unfit for such work, women were not allowed to immigrate in numbers. Thus Berberova lends her tales a final twist of melancholy: not only has the Russian Revolution shattered the dream of a homeland but the dream of a home as well. [David Andrews]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Billancourt Tales by Nina Berberova David Andrews Nina Berberova. Billancourt Tales. Trans. and intro. Marian Schwartz. New Directions, 2001. 175 pp. $24.95. Nina Berberova’s Billancourt Tales comprises thirteen slender, artful stories of emigré life as played out in Billancourt, a Russian suburb of Paris, during the 1920s and early thirties. Nabokov’s biographer, Brian Boyd, has dubbed Berberova “the most important novelist other than Nabokov himself to emerge in the emigration”—an apt coupling, considering that Berberova’s stories share striking affinities with the Russian master’s stories of the emigration. But the tales bear Chekhov’s stamp as well, particularly in their unremitting pessimism. Nearly every story ends bleakly, a fact that Grisha, the recurring narrator, ties to the fate of the Russian emigration generally. But this fatalism hardly detracts from the delicacy and seductiveness of Berberova’s early work. As Marian Schwartz explains, Berberova, convinced that her later fiction was more mature stylistically, “came to view her Billancourt ‘fiestas’ as of purely sociological interest,” but this is to judge these pieces too harshly. Berberova’s writing is spare, ironic, and lucid, which throws her characters into greater relief. There is the old woman who longs to see her first love one last time—and does. There is the man who throws his wife out, then spends his days waiting for her to crawl back—only to discover that she has died. Another man, tired of traveling but pining for companionship, gets engaged to an enigmatic young woman but loses her when he fails to follow her to America. Many of these stories are romances, with the emphasis on male loneliness. This motif derives from the setting. Many Billancourt emigrés worked in the Renault factory; deemed unfit for such work, women were not allowed to immigrate in numbers. Thus Berberova lends her tales a final twist of melancholy: not only has the Russian Revolution shattered the dream of a homeland but the dream of a home as well. [David Andrews]

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