Nina Berberova
Nina Nikolayevna Berberova () (St Petersburg, 26 July 1901 – Philadelphia, 26 September 1993) was a Russian writer who chronicled the lives of Russian exiles in Paris in her short stories and novels. She visited post-Soviet Russia. Her 1965-revision of the Garnett translation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina with Leonard J. Kent is considered the best translation so far by the academic Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit. Life. Born in 1901 to an Armenian father and a Russian mother, Nina Berberova was brought up in Saint Petersburg. She left Russia in 1922 with poet Vladislav Khodasevich (who died in  1939). The couple lived in Berlin until 1924 and then settled in Paris. There, Berberova became a permanent contributor to the Russian émigré publication "Posledniye Novosti" ("The Latest News"), where she published short stories, poems, film reviews,/ and chronicles of Soviet literature. She also collaborated with other Russian émigré publications in Paris, Berlin and Prague. The stories collected in "Oblegchenie Uchasti" ("The Easing of Fate") and "Biiankurskie Prazdniki" ("Billancourt Fiestas") were written during this period. She also wrote the first book-length biography of composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1936, which was controversial for its openness about his homosexuality. In  Paris, she was part of a circle of poor but distinguished visiting literary Russian exiles that included Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Vladimir Mayakovsky. From its inception in 1940, she became a permanent contributor to the weekly "Russkaia Mysl’" ("Russian Thought"). After living in Paris for 25 years, Berberova emigrated to the United States in 1950 and became an American citizen in 1959. In 1954, she married to George Kochevitsky, Russian pianist and teacher. She began her academic career in 1958 when she was hired to teach Russian at Yale. She continued to write while she  was teaching and published several "povesti" (long short stories), critical articles and some poetry. She left Yale in 1963 for Princeton, where she taught until her retirement in 1971. Berberova moved from Princeton, New Jersey, to Philadelphia in 1991. Berberova's autobiography, which details her early life and years in France, was written in Russian but published first in English as "The Italics are Mine" (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969). The Russian edition, "Kursiv Moi", was not published until 1983.