Banine

Banine, the pen name of Umm-El-Banine Assadoulaeff, was a French writer of Azerbaijani descent who lived from 1905 to 1992. Born in Baku, she wrote in French, and her autobiographical books cover the Caucasus of her youth and the émigré life she built in Paris, offering a personal view of a world that vanished after the revolution.

She came from a wealthy Baku family; her grandfathers were both among the rich men of Azerbaijan. Her father, Mirza Assadoulaeff, served as a minister in the short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, which existed from December 1918 to April 1920. At fifteen she was married against her will. When Soviet rule took hold, she left the region, stopped in Istanbul, where she left her husband, and eventually settled in Paris.

In Paris she worked as a shop assistant and as a couture model while continuing her studies. Gradually she built a reputation through translations, newspaper articles and French radio programmes, and she moved among the Russian émigré intelligentsia. Writers such as Montherlant, Kazantzakis and Malraux encouraged her to publish. She also became close to the German writer Ernst Jünger, whom she translated into French and to whom she devoted several books.

Her reputation rests mainly on her memoirs, above all Days in the Caucasus and Parisian Days. They blend intimate recollection with a portrait of an era. She also wrote about her conversion from Islam to Catholicism in I Chose Opium. Much of her later life went into making the history and culture of Azerbaijan known in France and across Europe, and she published articles on the situation in her homeland. Her legacy lies chiefly in those memoirs, which document the life of an Azerbaijani exile in postwar Paris.