At His Futile Preoccupations, Guy Savage, reviewing The Ladies of St. Petersburg, by Russian émigré Nina Berberova, writes:

I read a few articles that stated that while Nabokov is considered the greatest Russian emigre writer, Nina Berberova is also one of the greats.

From Brian Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, page 392:

In anticipation of Sirin's visit Khodasevich had invited Nina Berberova, along with other young writers, Yuri Terapiano, Vladimir Smolensky, and Vladimir Weidle. In her memoirs Berberova recalled the conversation that day between host and guest of honor as the prototype of Fyodor's imaginary talks with his fellow writer Koncheyev in The Gift. Nabokov denied the identification, and undoubtedly he was right. Two days later he called at Berberova's, where he met Yuri Felzen, a young prose-writer and Sirin admirer. Although he liked Berberova, he found her conversation tiresome: "the talk was exclusively literary, and soon I began to feel sick of it. I haven't had such conversations since high-school days. 'Do you know this? Do you like this? Have you read this?' In a word, awful."

A snippet of the conversation between Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev and Koncheyev, from The Gift:

Certainly if you open Goncharov or –"

"Stop right there! Don't tell me you have a kind word for Oblomov – that first 'Ilyich' who was the ruin of Russia – and the joy of social critics? Or you want to discuss the miserable hygienic conditions of Victorian seductions? Crinoline and damp garden bench? Or perhaps the style? What about his 'Precipice' where Rayski at moments of pensiveness is shown with 'rosy moisture shimmering between his lips'? – which reminds me somehow of Pisemski's protagonists, each of whom under the stress of violent emotion 'massages his chest with his hand!'"

"Here I shall trap you. Aren't there some good things in the same Pisenski? For example, those footmen in the vestibule, during a ball, who play catch with a lady's velveteen boot, horribly muddy and worn. Aha! And since we are speaking of second-rank authors, what do you think of Leskov?"