Presentation Date:
This session on The Accompanist by Nina Berberova was hosted by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies on May 15, 2013. It featured a discussion with Professor Julie Buckler of Harvard's Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Book description: Written right before the height of Stalin's purges by a Russian émigré living in Paris, this novella explores the tangled relationship between an opera singer, her husband, and her accompanist. The accompanist of the title is Sonechka, an 18-year-old girl, talented but impoverished and self-deprecating by reason of her lowly origin. She is abruptly lifted from her bleak life in St. Petersburg when a famous soprano, Maria Travin, employs her as a traveling companion. This books offers insight to Russian literary style, life in the USSR as both a have and a have-not, as well as the Russian émigré lifestyle of the 1930s.
View a recording of the session here: http://cmes.adobeconnect.com/p2dtr6ypo98/