A.M. Gorky in Germany: Nina Berberova's chronicle

The nature of N.N. Berberova’s book “My Italics” is complex: both literary and memoir. However, Berberova’s “Gorky text” is markedly documentary. It is created by diary entries made in the writer’s home. Berberova’s recollections of Gorky help to reconstruct the little-studied German period of the writer’s life and work. This reconstruction was partly carried out in practice by V.F. Khodasevich. But this experience does not diminish the value of Berberova’s book. “My Italics” is a kind of chronicle of Gorky’s life, including in Germany, which is important for chronicling the writer’s life and work. Berberova emphasizes the chronological mismatch between her and Khodasevich’s visit to Herinsdorf, where Gorky lived. She first visited Gorky with Khodasevich on August 27, 1922. But her portrait of Gorky is written not on behalf of “we” (me and Khodasevich), but of “me” (Berberova). In this sketch there is a momentary impression of the character’s appearance. But it also has a layering of later impressions and judgments. Here we see the advantage of verbal material in the work on a portrait before pictorial material - the superposition of several layers of the image, temporal and spatial, different points of view. This property extends to other Berber portraits. There are a lot of them: Andrey Bely, I.A. Bunin, A.A. Blok, D.S. Merezhkovsky and Z.N. Gippius and others. What they have in common is the superimposition of the first viewer’s perception of the heroes of his book on his later, personal vision on someone else’s vision. The technique of “shifting” different temporal and spatial layers is also present in the structure of the other, non-portrait parts of the book “Italics mine”. It is natural for memoir literature. Berberova’s description of her first meeting with Gorky is dominated by evening. More than once she marks the time: evening, creating in the story about Gorky a kind of analogue of Colyeyev’s “The Neverending Evening”. Differently from the first “out-of-the-way evening” with Gorky in Herinsdorf, Berberova structures another German segment of the writer’s life in Saarow. The semantic center of Gorky’s life in Saarow is the Sunday dinner at the writer’s home. Formally, Gorky’s German period covered 1921-1923. However, the upper bar - not on the geographical principle - Berberova raises to 1924.