http://www.bostonbibliophile.com/2010/11/review-ladies-from-st-petersburg-by.htm... ( )

Another book for a RL book group. I have to say that short stories or novellas, are not for me.

I find the shorter form frustrating. There isn't enough background detail to make the characters real, and their short time on stage seems too abrupt to develop a story. I don't really know what is going on, and more importantly, I don't care.

The characters were flat and one dimensional, and the stories were undeveloped and uninteresting.

The first novella was of 2 women, mother and semi-grown daughter, going on vacation, at the start of the revolution, which looked to some as a minor disturbance that would soon be pacified. Of course it wasn't. The mother dies, and the daughter is bereft, and now must accept a marriage proposal that she might not have, if the mother lived. Who cares ?

The second novella is about a formerly rich woman, Zoya, who is well educated. She uses her education to land a decent job. Her institute is evacuated because of the fighting in their former city. She doesn't flaunt her past, but it is obvious from her manner and her ragged belongings that she is a woman of quality. She ends up boarding with lower class, human pigs. They are coarse, uneducated, greedy, grasping, and full of hate for anyone who has or is better than they are. They don't wish to become better, they only want to destroy those who are. Zoya becomes ill, and unable to look out for herself or protect or defend herself from those she boards with. They throw her into a cab to dump her at the hospital, hoping that she will suffer and die.

The last novella is actually the best. A refugee man comes to a new large city (NYC), and tries to understand, fit in, and make a life for himself. In his journey he finds an apartment in his building that houses a mysterious man who offers friendship. The man also has magical binoculars that not only show the current time and places, but the past as well. The refugee feels that he can connect his past to his current life. He also discovers that the city has many unexpected sights and events.

This book was translated and it read well, and flowed smoothly. One of the issues is you are never sure if the translation sucks the life out of the stories or not. There is a foreword by the translator, she actually knew the author and tries to present her intentions faithfully. Still I am not sure it succeeded for me. I am not Russian, and nothing in these pages says Russian to me, except the names. ( )

This collection of three novellas from Nina Berberova may be slim in size and seem spare in narrative, but its soul is deep, dark and Russian through and through. Each novella is set in the early twentieth century and begins with an arrival. In the title story, “The Ladies from St. Petersburg,” a mother and daughter arrive for a vacation in the Russian countryside, but the mother dies suddenly and the upheaval the Revolution has caused in this village complicates her burial. In “Zoya,” a young woman flees from revolutionary violence in Kharkov only to land in a less-than-welcoming boarding house filled with hostile, suspicious women. When Zoya falls ill, she becomes a burden they cannot rid themselves of fast enough. And finally, in “The Big City,” we have one of Berberova’s final stories; it was written in 1952 and set in New York City. A man arrives in New York from Russia with little money or prospects. He finds an attic room in a tall apartment building to call home. In a moment of what reads like magical realism, he searches through the maze of hallways in his building for an old man who has turpentine to remove a paint stain from his trousers only to discover an alternate layer of streets, businesses, dwellings, and inhabitants, a whole interior city within his building. Unlike Berberova’s other works, the Russian roots of this protagonist remain a shadow that retreats behind thick clouds of the surprising and the surreal. In all three novellas in “The Ladies from St. Petersburg,” arrivals are really points of departure and, until death intervenes, there is no such thing as a final destination. ( )