Banine’s Parisian Days picks up from where from where Days in the Caucasus leaves off: with the still very young woman pulling into the Gare de Lyon having the escaped the clutches of her besotted yet unwanted husband—the result of a deal to get her father out of jail, out of Bolshevik Baku and out of the country—in Istanbul.

Parisian Days is no less charming than its predecessor, if rather less dramatic. The exoticism of Baku is replaced by that of the Tsarist and (as Banine has no qualms about calling it) Russian colonial diaspora in Paris: a motley group of Russian aristocrats and Caucasian businessmen turned wastrels and waiters. “The women ran up dresses and hats for one another,” Benign quotes the Russian author Teffi. “The men ran up debts.”

Her family—father, “beautiful” stepmother, two sisters and an “unbearable” brother-in-law—are living off of the sale of jewelry they had managed to bring with them from Baku. This soon runs out and Banine takes a job as a “mannequin” for a couturier in the Place Vendôme: a model, not a store-front dummy. She is invited in by her glamorous cousin Gulnar, who is herself living off her relatively elderly lover Otto, and often source of both envy and admiration:

And she was so elegant too, a Parisian elegance taken to perfection! She wore a black velvet suit, set off by a white blouse with a lace ruffle, and a small round hat in velvet felt with a bright-red feather attached amusingly on one side, pointing its blood-red flash at the sky.

Disapproving of Banine’s unattached state, Gulnar finds a middle-aged lover for her; this proceeds in a somewhat desultory fashion, in contrast to the melodrama that dominates Gulnar’s love life.

Narrative, however, is not really the book’s raison-d’être. It is of course the second part of Banine’s coming-of-age and journey toward being a writer:

When I look back over my already very long life, I am always surprised, astounded even, by its not terribly poetic resemblance to a Neapolitan ice cream with its layers of different colours and flavours.

But to read Parisian Days is instead to luxuriate in Banine’s powers of description and uncanny aptitude for the telling turn of phrase, in which she is, as previously, ably served by her translator Anne Thompson-Ahmadova.

Banine notes, for example, that although Ivan Bunin, a Russian writer who emigrated to France, was “the first Russian to receive the Nobel Prize in literature,” but “the small sum that he received did not last as long as the recipient, and he died in poverty.” Other well-known names fared little better:

A dozen members of the Tolstoy family also lived in Paris. At first they were as poor as church mice, so poor that when the film Anna Karenina was shown in Paris in the 1920s, the author’s daughter Tatiana Sukhotina-Tolstaya could not afford to go and see it.

Banine paints a vivid portrait of emigré life in Paris:

The huge region of my native Caucasus alone provided a considerable contingent of Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Ossetians, Circassians and Chechens, to whom were added Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars and Gypsies from all the regions, Balts, many of them of German origin, and finally Russians. This disparate society formed a diverse mass—whose only common denominator was the loss of homeland, nationality, property and social status. Had one been able to bring together in a specially selected location all the émigrés scattered around the world, one would have created an offshoot of the Russian Empire detached from its main trunk.

The portrait is simultaneously empathetic with candid and at times a bit waspish.

I recall female émigrés who made brilliant, socially successful matches, bringing to the union only the memory of a more or less glorious past and sometimes, it is true, a name. If the victim (the Frenchman) felt he had married beneath himself, he was soon disabused of the idea: it was the other party that had married beneath herself, and he was made well aware of it.

Or when describing some fellow Caucasians who were without employment:

They could have married rich Americans, because some …  were very handsome: tall, well built, with fiery looks and wasp waists, but all the rich ladies on the world market at the time had already been snapped up by Georgians, who specialized in the field and were so enterprising that they always appeared first on the scene.

All of which was a means to an end: to become a writer. “Life was waiting for me. I had to go and meet it despite the burden of my reluctant heart.” And the life she tells is of course colored by the writer she became: it can be hard to tell whether the life created the writer or, perhaps, the other way around.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.