First published in France in 2016, The Woman of a Thousand Names by Alexandra Lapierre makes its American arrival in this translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman. Lapierre traveled to Russia, Estonia, France, England, Italy and the United States over the course of three years, gathering letters, reports and accounts of the life of Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya-Benckendorff-Budberg--Moura to her friends. Though fictionalizing the biography of Baroness Budberg, Lapierre (Artemisia) nevertheless assures "readers can presume that all the protagonists, all the places, all the dates, all the words, and all Moura's acts of which I am aware have been rendered with as much accuracy as I can provide within this novel."
The Woman of a Thousand Names reads like classic Russian literature; perfectly apropos, for that is the way Moura lived her life. "She embodied the novelistic form so thoroughly that she came to belong wholly to legend, myth, and fantasy," writes Lapierre. "Facts and objective reality barely counted for her. She never owed anything to Truth. Except to her own truth." Lapierre holds nothing back in describing Baroness Budberg's life, with exacting detail painting the fluctuating state of the world (beginning with the Bolshevik Revolution and continuing on through the World Wars); the parade of lovers, friends, family, husbands and children who all knew a different side of her; and the near-constant changes in settings during Moura's tumultuous existence. Did anyone truly know who Moura was? Did she know herself? Lapierre leaves it up to readers to decide, lyrically presenting a life without judgment: "She was the personification of loyalty. She was the personification of deceit.... She was a survivor." --BrocheAroe Fabian, owner, River Dog Book Co.