Berberova, Nina (1901-1993), was a Russian writer who gained recognition late in her life. She wrote poems, novels, and short stories as well as biography, memoirs, criticism, and reviews. Berberova felt that life was not entirely a matter of free will or conscious choice and that, sometimes, forces outside human control shaped lives. These forces of fate could be psychological or biological. Berberova believed that this realization was not to be taken as a surrender; rather, life must be lived in a conscious, chosen way, and not passively experienced. Her fiction often underlines the difference between a life of endurance and bare survival and one of self-knowledge and action.