Book recommendation: Parisian Days by Banine
A 'rediscovered memoir' of an Azerbaijani immigrant in 1920s Paris
I haven’t done a book recommendation here before, but with this one, I could not resist. I discovered it by chance while browsing in the biographies section of a bookstore in Rhinebeck, NY called Oblong Books. The title Parisian Days jumped out at me immediately, so naturally I snatched it up.
Parisian Days is the tale of a young Azerbaijani emigré who moved to Paris as a teenager in the 1920s. She was born Umm-El-Banine Asadoulaeva in 1905 and later became known as Banine. She came from an oil-rich family who lost all their wealth during the Russian Revolution. It was a time of massacre and extreme tumult, and anyone who could flee at the time did.
At 15, she was married off to a young man she despised; they were living together in Constantinople (Istanbul today) before she ditched him in 1924. That’s when she took the Orient Express to Paris, where she joined her father, stepmother (her mother died after giving birth to her), two sisters and a cousin.
Even on arrival, I was enchanted by the ugly, sooty surroundings of the Gare de Lyon, as this was where I took my first steps as a Parisienne.
— Parisian Days, p15
One sister is married to a conservative Azerbaijani, the other is engaged to (and later marries) a wacky Spanish artist with whom she lives a very bohemian life in Paris. Banine describes wild parties at their apartment with an impressive cast of characters coming in and out like a revolving door.
The guests drank, ate, debated and danced with the passion of youth
and exotic temperaments prone to excess of all kinds.
— Parisian Days, p53
In Paris, she witnesses a freedom she had never known, and she’s ready and willing to shed her old life in favor of the new one. You have to imagine that the young Banine came from a conservative Muslim background and endured a forced marriage, so Paris represented a liberalism that she ate up like a really good piece of chocolate cake.
Paris of the 1920s allowed folks to rub shoulders with a very interesting set of people, from Ernest Hemingway to Georgian princes. Under the influence of her bohemian sister and (even by her own admission) gold-digging cousin, Banine cuts her long hair into the fashionable bob, tries her hand at modeling, and tastes the life of being courted by a much older man from Orléans who is deeply in love with her (the feeling is not mutual).
Banine paints a very interesting picture of the expatriates from the Russian and Caucasian communities who could afford to flee to the French capital while all hell was breaking loose back home. At the time, she says, there were 62 (!) Russian newspapers and magazines published in Paris, and she describes a microcosmic Russian community that mimicked that of the old world. There is a very interesting section of the book in which she really did her research on the Russian expatriate community — and even suggests further study could be done.
It turns out that rubbing shoulders with writers inspired her to become one herself. She published a number of books during her lifetime and wrote a lot about Azerbaijani history and culture. She lived for years in her apartment in the 16th arrondissement (where Hector Guimard’s designs live) and died in Paris in 1992 at the age of 86.
Parisian Days was written and first published in French in 1947. But to the English-speaking world, it only emerged in 2023, when it was finally translated into English. It is actually the second of two memoirs by Banine; the first is called Days in the Caucasus, which ends with her arrival in Paris. I have not read that one — yet. But I surely will.
A few reviews for further reading:
Wow, that first photo of her reminded me of a photo of my grandmother from the roaring twenties! I think it was her hat.
I got interested in reading this, but cannot find an edition in the original French, which I would prefer. Is the translation much more recent? I see it says "rediscovered."