Narration organization in N.N. Berberova's stories (from ''The Feasts of Billancourt'' to ''Where They Do Not Talk About Love, and Other Stories'')
N.N. Berberova (1891-1993), who is famous for her biography and memoirs books, left an almost undiscovered prosaic heritage, which includes such prose as stories and short novels of ''The Feasts of Billancourt'', 1929-1934; ''Where They Do Not Talk About Love, and Other Stories'', 1931-1949; ''Relieving the Fate'', 1934-1941, and four novels: <i>The Last and The First: Novel from Emigration </i>(1930), <i>The Sovereign </i>(1932), <i>Without Sunset </i>(1938), and <i>The Cape of Storms </i>(1948-1950). The series of stories ''The Feasts of Billancourt'' (published in ''The Latest News'' in 1929-1934) and the stories of the 1930s, which were later named ''Where They Do Not Talk About Love, and Other Stories'', are of vital importance not only as the prosaic debut of a young poetess, but also in the context of search of a new style of prose and new themes among the writers of emigration. Tendency to use colloquial common speech, objective simulation of the environment and its language traditionally presented by Gogol and developed by M. Zoshchenko, A. Platonov, and I. Babel helped to find the main subject: life of a common Russian ''proletariat'' emigre invisibly connected with the contemporary Soviet people. The author explained her success and the artistic imperfection of her stories by her unusual style of writing and by Zoshchenko's influence. However, Berberova's stories of 1920s-1930s are interesting not only from the sociological point of view as a popular mentality investigation of common emigres, but also aesthetically. Her own narrative style is formed in these stories, which will later shape in her mature prose in novels, biographies, and memoirs. Unfortunately, her author's orientation on skaz (narration) as a means of popular mentality expression is broken almost immediately. The change of the skaz onto personal first person singular narrative in ''The Feasts of Billancourt'' showed the shift of the author's attention from the psychology of ''mass emigre'' to the individual conscience, the inner person, from empathy to emigre life understanding. In the personal narrative of ''Where They Do Not Talk About Love, and Other Stories'' we can notice a dialogue between the narrator and the character: narrator's signs as a look from the outside corrects the character's position. Life stories, exploding the readers' expectations lead to the inner world cognition that is why they lack generalization. On the contrary, they reveal something unusual, phenomenal in ordinary life. The novelist events are often created by breaks in the narrative, by change of the narrative style. Berberova's narration in the stories of 1920s - 1930s highlights the change of the subject depicted and her personal authorial point of view: from the mass to individual conscience, from narrator's agreement with the character to their complicated interaction; from the emigre way of life depiction to the emigre existence understanding.