Berberova's father was an Armenian who worked in the Tsar's Ministry of Finance; her mother came from the landed gentry. In the early 1920s Berberova's poetry was noted in the literary salons of Petrograd. In 1922, along with her husband, Vladislav Khodasevich, she received permission to leave Russia. At first they lived with Maksim Gorky in Italy and Berlin and then settled in Paris, where they were divorced in 1932. For fifteen years Berberova worked for the Paris Russian newspaper Posledniye novosti and published several novels, the most successful of which was Tchaikovsky (1936). In 1950 she moved to the United States, where she taught at Princeton University until her retirement.
Fame came to her at the age of seventy-two when she published her autobiography, Kursiv moi (The Italics Are Mine). Caustic and unsparing, the book provoked a mixed reaction in émigré circles, but in the USSR it became a coveted item on the literary black market. In 1988 Berberova made a triumphant visit to the Soviet Union; where she discovered that she had become famous in her homeland.
