The Last and the First

August 1, 2021
Russian immigrants to France struggle to build new lives in this novel by Berberova (1901-1993). After the Russian Revolution, hundreds of thousands of people fled Russia for France. Some of them tried to build new lives there; others yearned to return. Berberova's elegant novel--appearing in English for the first time--takes up these immigrants as its subject. Ilya is setting up a farm in Provence; he is a hardworking, assiduous young man, and other Russians frequently look at him askance. When he tells a young woman--also Russian--that he is a farmer, she replies, "What on earth is that?" "Have you really not heard?" he tries to explain. "Lots of Russians are living that way now." Ilya does his best not only to build a life for himself and the remnants of his family--his stepmother, stepbrother, and stepsister--but also to train other Russian men, many of whom are desperately poor, to live in the new way. The mechanics of all this can be difficult to follow if the reader doesn't have a certain amount of background knowledge. But Ilya's family dynamics are more immediate and more poignant. His stepbrother, Vasya, wants only to return to Russia, where their father seems to be angling for his return. Ilya rushes to Paris to try to stop a few associates from taking off with Vasya, and there are a few other subplots tangled up along the way. Berberova hadn't matured yet as a writer; this was her first novel, and it shows: The plotting is imperfect. But her psychological portraits, dialogue, and prose are intensely elegant, even luminous. She seemed to have an otherworldly sense of what to say outright and what to leave implicit in her work. An imperfect but still beautiful novel and a harbinger of more to come.

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