Identity elements
Reference code
Name and location of repository
Level of description
Title
Date(s)
- undated (Creation)
Extent
2 page(s); Holograph (handwritten) signed letter.
Name of creator
Biographical history
Marina de Berg was a dancer and an actress in Paris. Born in Helsinki, Finland to parents of French and Russian orgin, she was orphaned at a young age. She achieved fame early in life as a ballerina and dancer and then as an actress primarily in the latter half of the 1940's. In the early 1950's and some professional setbacks, she questioned her place in the what she called the "wild frivolities" of life in the arts in Paris at the time. She recounts her decision to try a religious vocation with the Trappistine nuns in an autobiographical work, Trois ans à la Trappe in 1959 (translated into English as Heaven by the Hems: From Stage to Cloister, published by Sheed and Ward in 1961). She entered the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Saint-Joseph d'Ubexy, Charmes, France, in August of 1952. After a period of ill health and struggle with the rigors of the lifestyle, she left the nuns and began writing.
Content and structure elements
Scope and content
First lines: "I had a long letter of Dom Sortais… Well!!! Of course it's no…. The letter, well. He doesn't"... Contents index: Sortais feels used - that de Berg used him to get Merton to write an introduction / de Berg is finishing a psychological story and beginning a play / reading «Thoughts in Solitude».
System of arrangement
Conditions of access and use elements
Conditions governing access
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Conditions governing reproduction
Languages of the material
- English