Nina Berberova Analysis

    Nina Berberova starts by discussing her strong desire to find and decide on her profession. She felt the need to almost rush to find a profession from age 10 to take control of her life and make decisions on her own. As she writes, “The realization of my first strong desire to choose, to decide, to find, to move myself consciously in a chosen direction gave me for my whole life, as I now see it, a feeling of victory not over someone else but over myself, not bestowed from on high but personally acquired” (p.69). She is a bold young girl determined to follow the rules society had put in place for her. Nina sought out different a few different professions, but they were boring to her and she found herself uninterested. The one idea that stuck and flowed out of her was poetry. 

    I believe Nina struggles with the society horrors around her that she tries to explain in confidence her ideas of coming out on the other side of it. She writes, “[…] did they want to protect me? I am ready for them, I expect them, I burst out toward them” (p.73). In this quote she is referring to her parents Nina feels that she is not able to be protected by them. I think she has had her expectations set too high for her parents to always be there to protect her. This is why she takes matters into her own hands and learned how to write with both hands and walk with potential stumps for her legs. With all the horrors going on in Russia around her she felt that she needed to be prepared and protect herself. 


Word Count: 284

Comments

  1. livvcastroJanuary 22, 2021 at 6:43 AM

    Emmy,
    I like the point that you made where you said Nina rushed to find a profession to take control of her life and make her own decisions. I think that choosing a profession was one of the only things she felt that she had control over. I found it interesting when she mentioned how some professions were only for men. This made Nina’s decision not fully hers because there were still jobs that she was not allowed to do because society deemed that they were for men. Luckily she liked poetry and it was a profession that was okay for women within society.

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