Iron Woman

“Iron Woman” — a book about one of the most mysterious women of the 20th century, Maria (Mura) Zakrevskaya-Benkendorf-Budberg. She was loved, trusted, and her work was dedicated to by Maxim Gorky and Herbert Wells, and she captivated British diplomat and spy Robert Bruce Lockhart. Nina Berberova was acquainted with this remarkable person, and her brilliantly written novel, filled with documentary evidence and letters, has long been a bestseller. The world she lived in until 1918 was destroyed, yet she emerged from it unscathed. …This does not mean that Mura was without fears, but her fears were not the same, as those of our grandmothers; they were also new, just like the fates of granddaughters: fear of imprisonment, fear of hunger and cold, fear of being undocumented, and — perhaps — fear of revealing secrets. And the joys were new as well: the joy of personal life freedom, unrestrained by moral codes or by “what the neighbors will say”, the joy of surviving and enduring. Nina Berberova