Michael Dirda

There's no need to detail the rest of the Baroness Budberg's remarkable story. And much of its detail cannot be known. Eventually, Moura again met Robert Bruce Lockhart and may have become his roving agent. Gorky left all his papers with her when he returned to Russia, but then she was so harassed by the Soviets that she apparently delivered the archives to Stalin -- possibly in exchange for a last visit to her old lover, possibly at the dying writer's own request, possibly for other, unknown reasons. Most troubling is the likely use of those papers: Many of the letters to the politically influential Gorky spoke critically of Stalin's policies and may have added fuel to the show trials and purges of the 1930s.

By this time, though, Moura had seriously committed herself to H.G. Wells. Once Somerset Maugham asked what she saw in "the paunchy, played out writer." Moura sweetly answered, "He smells of honey."

Although Moura's life provides the thread of this biography, Berberova enriches the story with pen portraits of revolutionaries, spies, international financiers and what seem like half the characters from an Eric Ambler thriller. My favorite is Alexander Parvus, who left Russia at 19 for Switzerland, where he met Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and Lenin. He actually originated the notion of "permanent revolution," churned out scores of theoretical articles about politics and revolution, traveled on false passports to Russia and was eventually arrested with Trotsky in 1905. Exiled to Siberia, he escaped. Once back in Europe he managed to lay his hands on 130,000 gold German marks from Max Reinhardt's productions of "The Lower Depths" and other Gorky plays. He was supposed to keep the money safe for their author. Instead, he started a new life in the Ottoman Empire, working first as an arms merchant for Krupp and later as a dealer in grain and coal as well as weapons. By 1915 he was the chief adviser to the German general staff on the revolutionary movement in Russia. In 1917 he was instrumental in helping Lenin make his way from Switzerland to Petrograd, where the Bolshevik leader would alter the history of the world.

After the German defeat in World War I, Parvus bought a castle outside of Zurich, "installed women, old friends whom he wined and dined, and all sorts of riffraff. The Swiss authorities deported him to Germany for having 'orgies.' In 1920 he bought another castle, or rather, palace, outside Berlin, on Wannsee Island. There he lived on a grand scale, receiving throngs of friends, among them former ministers, diplomats, German Social Democrats, and members of the government. He was surrounded by liveried butlers, secretaries, a majordomo, and a chef. He prescribed his own etiquette. The riffraff were now gone. The women were high-class coquettes, actresses, beauties." Parvus publicly criticized the Treaty of Versailles, duly predicted World War II and even paid back the money he had stolen from Gorky.

There are many such colorful bit players in Moura , and one of the most fascinating is the author of this biography herself. Nina Berberova, only a little younger than her subject, went into exile with the Russian poet Khodasevich during the 1920s, lived many years in Paris, wrote highly acclaimed works of biography and fiction ( The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels ), and ended her life as a professor of Russian at Princeton, dying in her nineties. This, she felt, was her best book. Some readers may still prefer her fine autobiography, The Italics Are Mine .

Berberova concludes her preface to Moura with a low-keyed sentence that brings both tears and a chill. More than anything else, she says, Moura appreciated "the joy of a free private life unhampered by a moral code of 'what the neighbors might say'; the joy of surviving intact; the joy of knowing she had not been destroyed by those she loved." ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is dirdam@washpost.com. His online discussion of books takes place each Wednesday at 2 p.m. at washingtonpost.com.