The Ladies from St. Petersburg

First edition in English. Sm. 8vo. Pp. xx, 122, [2 (blank)]. Quarter-bound blue cloth over grey paper-covered boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Jacket illustration detail from Improvisation 19, by Wassily Kandinsky, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; design by Sylvia Frezzolini Severance.

Translated and with a foreword by Marian Schwartz.

A New York Times Notable Book of 1998. The last volume in the author's great trilogy, consisting of Cape of Storms, The Book of Happiness, and The Ladies from St. Petersburg, all penned during her years of exile in Paris. It contains three novellas – the first two of which (including the title-story) were written in 1927 and the third in 1952 – that paint a picture of the dawn of the Russian Revolution, the flight from its turmoil, and the plight of an exile in an unfamiliar environment.

"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. Exiled in 1922, together with her poet husband, Vladislav Khodasevich, Berberova used fiction to chronicle her experience of displacement. "In her description of Paris at that period, she rivals Jean Rhys in detailing the sights and smells and despairs of trying to exist as a stranger in that city." –The Times