The Book of Happiness

First edition in English. Sm. 8vo. Pp. [x], 205, [9 (blank)]. Quarter-bound black cloth over grey paper boards, lettered in silver to spine; black-coated endpapers. Jacket illustration "Sailing Boats," cotton muslin, Russian, 1930s; design by Sylvia Frezzolini Severance.

Translated from the original Russian Книга о счастье, by Marian Schwartz. Originally published in the February, July, and November 1936 issues of the Parisian journal, Sovremennye zapiski (Современные записки, "Contemporary Papers").

A novella about the half-life of Russian émigrés in Paris in the inter-war years. The second volume in her great trilogy preceded by Cape of Storms and bookended by The Ladies from St. Petersburg, and by far the most autobiographical. "Discovered" in the 1980s by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis whilst working as an editor at Viking and Doubleday, when she chanced upon French volumes by Actes Sud of Berberova's fiction. Banished by Lenin in 1922, together with her poet husband, Vladislav Khodasevich, Berberova used fiction to chronicle her émigré experience of displacement. "A deftly nuanced novel." –Washington Post Book World