The Accompanist
By Nina Berberova

Translated from the Russian

by Marian Schwartz

New Directions. 94 pp. $11.95 (Paperback Original)

The next time someone publishes a guide to Philadelphia literary history, or a map of its literary sites, attention should be paid to a modest condo in I.M. Pei's Society Hill Towers.

There, for the last three years of her life, in her "little piece of America," lived the fiercely energetic woman who may well be remembered as Russia's foremost prose writer of the 20th century: Nina Berberova (1901-1993), author of this sublime and now happily reissued 1936 novel.

Most of those who love 20th-century Russian literature know Berberova, partly because she knew and judged almost everyone else. Born in St. Petersburg to a privileged bourgeois family, married to the poet Vladislav Khodasevich (Vladimir Nabokov called him "the greatest Russian poet of all time"), forced, like many Russian artists and intellectuals, to leave the new Soviet state for Berlin and Paris, she propelled herself to America in 1950 with little money or English, working at menial jobs before becoming a Princeton professor - and a conscience that spanned the century.

Although Berberova described herself as made of "pig iron" and once wrote, "I could never sacrifice a living instant of life for the sake of a line to be written," she lived to see her classic emigre novels and superb memoir published in English to high acclaim, just as her French reputation grew in the early '80s when the prestigious French publisher Actes Sud started issuing her work.

That caustic, brilliantly impressionistic autobiography, The Italics Are Mine (which takes her to the early 1950s), ends with a rich "Who's Who" glossary of Russian literary and cultural players, spiced by peppery judgments. By the September Sunday on which she died in the New Ralston nursing home at 36th and Chestnut Streets, she'd won a fresh generation of sophisticated admirers (Marcello Mastroianni came to Philadelphia to pay her a private visit), while remaining largely unknown to a wider reading public.

Her novellas, six gathered in English as The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels, provide a clipped, unsentimental counterpoint to the flamboyant Nabokov, the great male emigre-master of 20th-century Russian prose. Nabokov's inventiveness lifted him off the planet of purely Russian-accented fiction. Berberova, like the recently celebrated Andrei Makine, could no more shed Russian themes than her accent. In her works, taut prose, acute character portraits, and a stunningly antiromantic existential ethos combine in tales of emigre Russians, their choices and their comeuppances.

To its credit (following the earlier publication of Berberova's major works by Knopf and Harcourt during her lifetime), New Directions continues to reissue Berberova's other fiction: The Billancourt Tales, The Book of Happiness, Cape of Storms, The Ladies From St. Petersburg, and now, this summer, The Accompanist.

A brisk, almost sadistic probe into the mind of Sonechka, a young woman pianist in postrevolutionary Russia who agrees to become the live-in and traveling accompanist of Maria Travina, a beautiful and celebrated Russian soprano, The Accompanist is the best-seller that launched all of Berberova's other fiction in Paris.

Short and prickly, it draws on Berberova's distinctive virtues and setting (Paris), while also radiating a feel for existential self-loathing reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre's nearly contemporary work, Nausea.

Despite her musical ability, Sonechka, who judges herself "neither smart nor pretty," wallows in shame. She owes her birth to a dalliance by her mother, a ne'er-do-well piano teacher, with a much younger student.

Sonechka's abased self-image is understandable: "My boots were made from a rug, my dress from a tablecloth, my winter coat from mama's cloak, my hat from some gold-embroidered sofa cushions." Maria, by contrast, is ebullient, confident, generous, because "success envelops her everywhere, like air." That infuriates Sonechka, who catalogs their disparities:

She has smooth black hair tied in a knot at her nape; my hair is fair and lifeless, and I cut it short and try to curl it. She has a beautiful round face, a big mouth, a smile of ineffable charm, and green-streaked black eyes; my eyes are pale, my face triangular and high-cheekboned, my teeth narrow and widely spaced. She walks, talks, sings so confidently... . Around me (this I sense) there sometimes forms a hazy cloud of hesitancy, indifference, boredom, in which I tremble the way nocturnal insects tremble in sunlight before they're blinded and die.

As Sonechka's life intertwines with Maria's, her envy waxes. As she speculates on Maria's love life, it burns - resentment mingling with loftier ressentiment. Meanwhile, Berberova's withering vignettes stud a tight plot like sudden billboards at the side of the road. Maria's voice "gives reality to the human being's dream of having wings and suddenly becoming weightless." When Sonechka looks in the mirror, she sees someone ready "to set fire to the ancestral home."

Sonechka may be a stranger to happiness, but, she muses, "clocks tick too without happiness, and rain falls without happiness." Yet once Berberova's tale ticks to its climactic event, the consequences reflect the author's bent toward self-reliance, refusal to perish, and sheer appetite for life. She etches the jealousy of the self-pitying in unmerciful strokes.

As a stylist, Berberova stands as a Russian Hemingway who, unlike the original, projects an ethos of worldly sophistication in her clipped sentences. But if, as histories such as Anne Applebaum's recent Gulag help us realize, the crimes of the Soviet Union exceeded those of Nazi Germany in volume and duration, Berberova stands also as the Proust of one international consequence: Russia's often tragic cultural diaspora, a troubled world from which she extracted variations like a Rachmaninoff.

In that richly descriptive glossary of 127 Russian cultural figures - many exiled or executed - at the close of The Italics Are Mine, Berberova denied only two any description beyond inclusion of their names and dates: Lenin, Vladimir Ilych (1870-1924), and Stalin, J.V. (1878-1953).

The contempt was hers.