The Last and the First by Nina Berberova, translated by Marian Schwartz
Hey everyone! You may have noticed I haven’t published any reviews for a while - that’s partly because I’ve been working on some articles for my friend’s website, 2 Rules of Writing. You can read my first article for their website here.
By by Nina Berberova, translated by Marian Schwartz
224 Pages. Pushkin Press. $18.
If you were given a superficial description of its subject matter, you might assume that Nina Berberova’s 1929 novel The Last and the First was completely a work of its time, a social issue novel for an issue that has long been forgotten. Its plot hinges upon the peculiar political circumstance of Russian emigres in France in the late 1920s. The Soviet Union, building a new government and economy after its civil war, was trying to lure back educated Russians who had fled the country; meanwhile, Russians who wanted to stay away from the new communist state had to decide how they would live their lives in their new country. The characters of the novel are, as the title indicates, the last of the pre-revolutionary generation and the first of the post-revolutionary generation.
But this description does not capture the heart of the novel, and it is not what caused Vladimir Nabokov (as he is quoted on the back of this Pushkin Press edition) to call The Last and the First “a unique, harmonious, and brilliant book.” Marxist-Leninist doctrine, geopolitics, capitalism, socialism, liberalism go basically undiscussed by the novel’s characters. Less abstract political realities of everyday life in France and Russia after the First World War and Soviet revolution are generally only alluded to.
All of this is not to say that The Last and the First lacks a perspicacity when it comes to political and social matters. Here and there we get telling hints of the larger context of its story. One character “looked like a Russian intellectual, that is, someone of mixed blood.” At another point, a Russian emigre living in Paris bemoans that the only pleasures in the city are the “cinema and bed, and the cinema is pure poison… And bed… what good is it when there’s nothing you can do for your children, when you shouldn’t be having children. For a Russian woman a bed without children is no pleasure!”
As sharp-edged as these observations are, they are fleeting departures from the otherwise narrowly-focused story of the Gorbatovs, a family of Russian emigres living in rural France, each of whom takes a different perspective on their new situation. The head of the family is the matriarch Vera Kilirilovna, who is weary from a turbulent life but emotionally steady and a reliable presence to her children. Her stepson Ilya wants to make their part of rural France a sort of Russian colony, while Vera’s daughter Marianna wants to marry a local Frenchman and her biological son Vasya is offered a return to Russia.
The plot begins when Alexei Shiabin, a family friend of the Gorbatov’s and former lover of Vera Kirilovna, returns to the Vera after some years of trying to make a life for himself in Morocco. Shiabin arrives just in time to travel to Paris with Ilya, who is going to the city both to convince more Russian emigres to make the transition to an agricultural lifestyle and to meet with Adolf Kellerman, the wily Soviet who is attempting to lure Vasya back to his father in Russia.
In Paris, Shiabin and Ilya meet with other Russians in the city; they each have several purposes in mind, but their activities seem ultimately to revolve around one woman: Nyusha, a performer who had been the lover of both men. Nyusha, without a home, family, or respectability, is nevertheless the conscience of the men, reminding them of the unspoken hardships they would otherwise like to suppress.
As the novel proceeds, this complicated dynamic unfolds in prose of remarkable poise. There are no unnecessary details, the language is never particularly lyrical, and yet Berberova’s intense precision allows The Last and the First to have a powerful style of its own. In mood it recalls earlyish Henry James with his domestic dramas to hinge on the finest points of social conduct, except here the stakes are much higher, the atmosphere of regret and unease with the world much more palpable.
Berberova’s greatest strength as a writer is to evoke a character’s point of view through brief, telling details, ones which convey their state of mind much better than paragraphs of interiorizing would have done. At one point, we see Ilya’s inner conflicts as he waits to see Adolf Kellerman in Kellerman’s upscale Parisian residence. Sitting in a “dark and most likely large apartment, where portraits of beauties and aged military men hung on the walls” Ilya imagines the former inhabitants must have been “people with an irreproachable past and moderate desires to whose fulfillment they had devoted their entire placid lives.” From this description, we realize that Ilya, not his parents who knew the reality of pre-revolutionary life, may in fact be the true “last” - the last person still pining for imagined Russian past.
In spite of the title of The Last and the First, Nina Berberova’s focus is not on beginning or ends but on middles, on the fluidity of outcome between an action and its final effect. Like a great 19th century novelist, she is at her best when at the center of a story,1 and like many 20th century writers of an existential bent, she is fascinated with the moments before a decisive action must be taken. The Last and the First, written just as the last embers of the First World War were dying and just before the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, and Stalin’s terror would send Europe hurtling towards another great catastrophe, serves a memorial to the individual freedom that was still able to survive amid cataclysmic times.
In fact, the initial chapter and final chapter are the weakest of the novel.