BOOK REVIEW : Cool Breeze Raises a Russian Sandstorm : THE ITALICS ARE MINE:<i> By Nina Berberova Translated from Russian by Philippe Radley</i> ; $30; 600 pages

Autobiographical writing can be a work of love, aiming to regain the past; or of anger, aiming to overcome it. Nina Berberova writes differently, in a cool breeze of renunciation.

“The Italics Are Mine” was published in the late 1960s and is now reissued after the recent success of Berberova’s short story collection, “The Tattered Cloak.” It tells of her comfortable childhood before the Russian Revolution, of her exalted immersion in the inflamed artistic milieu just after it, of 30 years of European exile among the refugees from the revolution’s successive bouts of child-devouring, and finally of freedom and solace in the United States.

She was caught up in many of the heavings that successively spewed out czarists, Liberal Democrats, Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Trotskyites and Stalin’s Old Bolshevik purge victims. She refused to see herself as their victim.

In a way, her book is a war against memory; or more exactly, against memory as a way of life. She could not stand--perhaps she could not let herself stand--the serial fixations that went with the serial traumas. There was the obsession of each sector of the vast and disparate exile world with its own “Russian problem”; the tendency to dwell on the particular political or artistic high-water mark that flooded each of them out.

Berberova remembers a country estate and a lavish St. Petersburg apartment. As a baby, she gnawed on Goncharov’s watch-case; her fat great-grandfather was a model for his “Oblomov.” But her voice could not be more distant from the lambent nostalgia of Nabokov in “Speak, Memory.” With her family reduced to two crowded rooms in a St. Petersburg flat and scrabbling to survive, she can--retrospectively--declare of the revolution:

“I am 17. I am nobody. I accept it as the ground on which I will sprout.” She recalls destitution in Paris years later and the deep depression of her husband, the poet Khodasevich, who sleeps until noon, writes for exile magazines and mourns. “He fears the world. I do not. He fears the future. I rush towards it.” She describes a fine-spirited Russian friend as “made of porcelain.” By contrast, “I considered myself made of pig-iron.”

In the mid-1930s she leaves Khodasevich, first making him enough borscht for three days and darning his socks. There was nobody else at that point; she knew that there would be; she wanted to go before there was. The past is worth remembering--”Italics” is 600 pages long--but not submitting to.

A poet, and the protege in St. Petersburg of Gumilev, Berberova knew many of the great figures. She recorded their sufferings but had no patience with victim-dramatics. Pasternak’s wincings annoyed her, Mayakovsky’s suicide infuriated her. “He did not just shoot himself. He shot a whole generation.”

She disapproves of what she seems to see as Marina Tsvetaeva’s penchant for isolation and defeat, and her emotional theatrics. Decidedly chilly, she recalls a gathering when Tsvetaeva pulled out the light cord and began tickling her in the dark. Berberova jumps up indignantly. “The light goes on,” she proclaims. “This is not at all, not at all to my liking.”

There are a number of vivid portraits. Berberova evokes the excitement of Berlin in the 1920s, when things still appeared in flux in the Soviet Union, and some artists hoped that exile would be a temporary recess until conditions should improve. There is the neurasthenic poet, Andrey Bely, who suddenly decides it is time to go back, jumps on a train and then tries to jump off again, shouting “Too soon. Too soon.” There is Gorky, another temporary exile, with his love-hate relationship with Lenin and a warm hospitality for other exiled artists.

She writes of the leaner, sadder 1930s in Paris, when hope died and--what with the widespread admiration among European intellectuals for the Soviet Union--isolation grew. She writes of hardship under the German occupation, her sense of aimlessness and stultification in postwar Paris and her emigration to the United States in 1950.

For her, it was a happy ending. Not only was life easier than in Europe--she found a university job--but it felt immensely freer. She writes lyrically of traveling around the country, of landscapes, of excursions with friends. Above all, she writes of being released from her countrymen’s vision of history as tragedy. History for Berberova--and life--is not a tragedy but an epic; a succession of unburdened presents, each seized for itself.

There are great gaps. “Together with 600 pages of text there are 600 pages of silence in this book,” she writes. She maintains her emotional privacy; she does not disclose the name of the man she lived with after Khodasevich. Her breakup with this man, after 10 years, is hinted at, exasperatingly. It involved, she tells us, a struggle over “a third person.” There are also any number of innocuous facts that would have helped, but are withheld; the name of the man she married in the United States, for instance, and the name of the university where she taught.

Such gaps are not really for privacy. They seem to be part of the emotional loftiness that sweeps through pages and pages like a sandstorm, and obscures our view. It is a traditional Russian literary trait; a feeling that to tie an emotion to its particulars is to diminish it. What it does is to weaken Berberova’s book; it means that she emerges more hazily than many of those she writes about. It is probably her intention.

Next: Chris Goodrich reviews “Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice and Alcohol-Free Beer” by P.J. O’Rourke (Atantic Monthly).