Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg [Hardcover]

Baroness Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya Benckendorff Budberg hailed from the Russian aristocracy and lived in the lap of luxury—until the Bolshevik Revolution forced her to live by her wits. Thereafter her existence was a story of connivance and stratagem, a succession of unlikely twists and turns. Intimately involved in the mysterious Lockhart affair, a conspiracy which almost brought down the fledgling Soviet state, mistress to Maxim Gorky and then to H.G. Wells, Moura was a woman of enormous energy, intelligence, and charm whose deepest passion was undoubtedly the mythologization of her own life.

Recognized as one of the great masters of Russian twentieth-century fiction, Nina Berberova here proves again that she is the unsurpassed chronicler of the lives of Soviet émigrés. In Moura Budberg, a woman who shrouded the facts of her life in fiction, Berberova finds the ideal material from which to craft a triumph of literary portraiture, a book as engaging and as full of life and incident as any one of her celebrated novels. Nina Berberova, canny witness and survivor, tells a story that offers the satisfactions of history and the intimacy and strangeness of her extraordinary fiction. She brings to life not only the unknowable Baroness Budberg—probable spy, sometime translator and film scenarist—but her unlikely trio of lovers—the British agent Bruce Lockhart, Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells.
— Honor Moore

“In this fascinating late work by a writer of genius, the encounter of biographer and subject—the Baroness, lover of Wells as well as Gorky, suspected spy and double agent—is among the most mysterious and vital in twentieth-century literature. Nina Berberova was a gourmand of the ‘juiciness’ of secrets, the tingle of lies and silence. She claims to have left herself out of her portrait of Moura, whom she knew and whom she admired for her refusal to be a victim. But the book is permeatedl³.