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.