TeffiRecensioni

The popular playwright and comic writer describes her last months in Russia and Ukraine during the chaotic aftermath of the Revolution, as she leaves Moscow together with other theatre people to find work first in Kyiv and then in Odesa and other cities on the Black Sea before she is finally obliged to go into exile. Writing some ten years after the event, she gives us a very clear sense of the confusing reality of living through the collapse of the world you’ve lived in all your life, and the difficulty of persuading yourself that this is really happening and won’t all magically be put right tomorrow.

Without ever being unnecessarily sentimental, the book is also an eloquent farewell to the pre-war arts scene in Moscow and Petersburg, and a memorial to all the many friends she lost during the Revolution and Civil War.½

These stories span the career of Teffi and share a feeling for the experience of religion.

I had read so many books translated from Russian, but somehow no books by women, which seemed ridiculous. When I set out to remedy that, Teffi was one of those names that I ran into, over and over.

I loved this just like multiple people told me I would. There are a few odd/sour notes when describing people of different races, and Teffi's fame as a writer certainly cushions her experiences, but this memoir of being a refugee in a time of upheaval bears some uncomfortably timely observations.

The constant guessing is what feels most exhausting to imagine. Guessing where it is safe to flee to. Guessing when it is time to pack up once again. The scarcity of information and the constant quest for more. Never knowing if each exile is permanent, if you will ever see any of these series of homes again.

I need to keep an eye out for more of her writing.

Sometimes when you read a book, the author's personality shines through so strongly that convinced you would hit it off immediately, you wish you could somehow meet. So it was with this collection of writings by Teffi.

Probably such a meeting would be as humiliating as the one the thirteen year old Teffi had with Tolstoy. Recounted in the short story "My First Tolstoy", (1920), Teffi captures perfectly the awkwardness of such a meeting when everything you pictured saying and doing condenses into the briefest of encounters. How else could it be when you plan to ask the great author to save Prince Andrei?

While it's easy to relate to the stories from childhood, seeing yourself in the anecdotes, it's a completely different matter with "Rasputin". Written in 1924, Teffi's encounters with Rasputin are still fresh enough in memory to enable her to convey a chilling picture of a sexual predator, a 'sorcerer' as she describes him, a man who has asked particularly to meet her. Reading of his murder, she remembers his prediction:

...there's one thing they don't know: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia.
Remember me then! Remember me!

She did.

Much of Teffi's fame in Russia was as a satirist. Satire usually has a short shelf life. However, reminiscences such as "New Life", recalling the politics of the Petersburg newspaper where she worked for awhile, are just as relevant to any office setting today, and still inspire a chuckle.

Teffi left Russian in 1919, just after writing "The Gadarene Swine", a devastating critique of the Whites. She didn't fully realize at the time that she would never return. Perhaps saddest of all are her reflections written in exile, such as "Ilya Repin", a sketch of a celebrated Russian artist living in Finland. His early portrait of her had disappeared, probably to the US. She wrote in 1951, a year before she died

I've never been able to hold on to anything. Neither portraits, nor poems dedicated to me, nor paintings I've been given, nor letters from interesting people. Nothing at all.

There is a little more preserved in my memory, but even this is gradually, or even rather quickly, losing its meaning, fading, slipping away from me, wilting and dying.
It's sad to wander about the graveyard of my tired memory, where all hurts have been forgiven, where every sin has been atoned for, every riddle unriddled and twilight quietly cloaks the crosses, now no longer upright, of graves I once wept over.

Born in St. Petersburg in 1872, Teffi’s first career had been brilliant: a feuillitoniste in the brittle, intelligent world of post-1905 Petersburg and Moscow, she met and was admired by the worlds of theater, literature, art, dance — and revolutionary politics.

The Bolsheviks lost all sense of humor, though, and Memories is an account of Teffi’s retreat from Moscow, autumn 1918, by train, cart, train again, through the border area between red- and white-Russian (administered by Germany), then on to Kiev, and (momentarily) French-occupied Odessa; then by ship to Sevastopol and Novorossiisk, with a quick train trip to Yekaterinodar; ultimately back to Novorossiisk for voyage (not described) to Constantinople. She is beset by war, unreliable transportation and housing, hunger, and disease; on every side people steal, disappear, are summarily shot. Her fame as playwright, columnist, and celebrity help her more than once; her manipulation of the men who hope to use her is admirable.

The handsome book, well translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson, and Irina Steinberg, includes a useful map, notes explaining people and places and clarifying political and intellectual details of the time, but lacks index and, worse, chronology.

Teffi’s optimistic pragmatism and alert eye to absurdity bring Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française and Marta Hillers’s A Woman in Berlin to mind. But Némirovsky died soon after writing her book; Hillers renounced writing after hers: Teffi went on to a second, 30-year career in Paris after the journey described in Memories.

Memories contains an introduction by Edythe Haber, who subsequently produced a biography, Teffi: A Life of Letters and of Laughter: this should be very interesting — as should two collections of her Paris writins: Subtly Worded (stories), Pushkin Press, 2014, and Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The best of Teffi, New York Review Books, 2016.

Teffi was a famous and much-loved a writer in pre-revolutionary Russia. Lenin was a fan, though she was no fan of his, and so was the Czar. She wrote short, humorous pieces for left-wing magazines. Teffi had supported the first revolution, but not the subsequent Bolshevic revolution that overthrew the provisional government. This memoir describes her flight from Russia, ahead of the Bolshevic army. Initially she left for what she thought was a temporary sojourn in Odessa, where there was plenty of food, unlike Moscow and St Petersburg, comfortable accommodation, and the opportunity to perform readings of her work. She believed that the Bolsheviks would not endure, and had no idea that she was leaving Russia for ever.

Teffi writes lightly of tragedy. She observes dishonesty and betrayal with sardonic humour, and of barbarity with humanity, even compassion. Her lightness of touch is a counterpoint to the disasters she describes: people she last saw in a drawing room in St Petersburg executed for treason; gay and frivolous young men on their way fight and die for a doomed cause; the barbarity of the White colonel whose wife and children were tortured in front of him. Interspersed with the tragic episodes are the frivolous stories of actors and plays, new journals popping up overnight, women fitting in a last hair appointment before they flee.

The translation, by a string of people that includes Robert Chandler, flows well without jarring, and, as far as I can judge, does a good job of imparting Teffi's humour.

I delightful discovery! Another fantastic woman writer to add to my collection. I cannot wait to read more of her works!

Engrossing glimpse into the past½

I’ll be honest, I had never even heard of Teffi until very recently. As this collection started a bit slowly for me with her early work starting from 1910, I was initially thinking that as a whole it would only be mildly amusing. Then I came to ‘The Lifeless Beast’ (1916), the marvelous story of a marriage falling apart told from a child’s perspective with just the right touch, and knew that I was on to something. From there it just gets better.

You see Teffi’s evolution as an author and political critic in the stories after the Revolution, with ‘One Day in the Future’ (1918) pillorying the idea that the intelligentsia are replaceable with the unskilled in a communist state. Then you hit the 45-page ‘Rasputin’ (1932), an absolutely stunning story of a couple of meetings Teffi had with the legendary mystic who wheedled his way into Tsar Nicholas II’s inner circle. She brilliantly captures everything from his mannerisms to his contradictory, somewhat bizarre essence, as well as the ways in which he tried to impose his will on others. I was spellbound and fascinated by such a unique account, which is easily five stars on its own.

Her stories written as an émigré in Paris, including ‘Subtly Worded’ (1920), about how letters had to be written to loved ones still in Russia to avoid the censor, as well as ‘My First Tolstoy’ (1920), about her meeting as a child with the legendary author, are precious. Her stories about the difficulties of love, including ‘The Dog (A Story From a Stranger)’ (1936), with the faithfulness of an unrequited lover taking on supernatural proportions, and ‘Thy Will’ (1952), about the difficulty of truly letting go of a failed love affair, are also first-rate.

The last story, ‘And Time Was No More’ (1949), about the thoughts a woman has while she is dying, is an absolute masterpiece, also easily five stars. It’s poetic, philosophical, and incredibly well written. Teffi was 77 at the time and only a few years away from her own death, and it’s apparent that it encapsulates her own thoughts looking back on life.

Bravo to Pushkin Press for assembling this collection. Apparently Teffi’s pre-Revolution popularity waned not only in Russia, which is understandable given her political views and subsequent immigration, but also in the West, because among many the early Soviet state was looked on somewhat favorably as an idealistic experiment. There are some real gems here, and she deserves to be better known.

Quotes, all from ‘And Time Was No More’:
On death:
“This is how I feel about the world soul, and this, therefore, is how I feel about death. Death is a return to the whole, a return to oneness.”

“…this is all there is to death: it is something tiny, indivisible, a mere point, the moment when the heart stops beating and breathing ceases, and someone’s voice says, ‘He is dead now.’ That’s eternity for you. And all the elaborations of a life beyond the grave, with its agonies of conscience, repentance and other torments – all this is simply what we experience while we’re alive. There is no place for such trivial nonsense in eternity.”

On snow, and peace:
“Nothing on earth creates a sense of peace and calm like falling snow. Maybe because when something falls it’s usually accompanied by some noise, by a knock or a crash. But snow – this pure and almost unbroken white mass – is the only thing that falls without any sound. And this brings a sense of peace. Often now when my soul feels restless, I think of falling snow, of silently falling snow.”

On the universe:
“We look up at the starry sky the way a little mouse looks through a chink in the wall at a magnificent ballroom. The music, the lights, the sparkling apparitions. Strange rhythmical movements, in circles that move together and then apart, propelled by an unknown cause towards an incomprehensible goal. It’s beautiful and frightening – very, very frightening. We can, if we like, count the number of circles made by this or that sparkling apparition, but it’s impossible to understand what the apparition means – and this is frightening. What we can’t understand we always sense as a hostile force, as something cruel and meaningless. Little mouse, it’s a good thing that they don’t see us, that we play no role in their magnificent, terrible and majestic life.”½

For years I looked through Russian emigre journals from Paris and Harbin and San Francisco, able to read 30% of it, enough to know that everyone loved Teffi. But who's Teffi, what kind of a name is that. Finally this year, after some 90 years, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler together with Anne Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg have completed the first English translation of Teffi's memoir of her long journey from Moscow to the Black Sea in the wake of the Russian collapse in World War I.

When the Bolsheviks withdrew from the war, they lost big chunks of the empire including Ukraine, and lost the whole infrastructure of the vast millenium-old empire. There was no food. Looting was the only way to survive. Dead horses were carved up for food. People were shot in the streets for looking bourgeois. And their watches, rings, and gold teeth were stolen. It was what we would call a failed state. Reasonable people thought that somehow reason would eventually prevail and order would be restored. It wasn't.

Teffi was in sympathy with democracy. She was a beloved writer, so loved there was a perfume named after her, and a type of chocolate. Tsar Nicolas II loved her writing, Lenin read everything she wrote, her plays attracted full houses, hipsters went to cabarets to hear her sing her songs. But she didn't have anything to eat in frozen St. Petersburg so she went to Moscow. Not much better. But she kept on writing and singing and performing. Even hungry people want to be entertained.

But it was getting dicey. A wiley impressario named Gooskin promised her part of the take if she'd give readings in Ukraine, nominally independent, and full of people in need of entertainment. He promised her the best room at the London Hotel in Odessa, or maybe the International. Gooskin, not his real name, saved her life. There was food in Kiev. But then she had to extract herself from Gooskin who wanted her as a trophy to bring home to his mother in Odessa, so she bought out her contract and then got swept on to Odessa anyway where people wanted to be entertained.

No one really knows how many refugees were expelled during the Russian Revolution and Civil War, maybe one million, maybe three. Some went through Europe, some through Turkey, some through China. They all loved Teffi. She wrote about their experience. "Here I am dancing around in the rain with no idea whom to bribe." -- "No one was getting searched or shot. It all felt very cosy." She lurched on trains through Ukrainian war zones with Petliura and Skorapadski competing with Germans and Bolsheviks. She didn't know where she would sleep at night. She didn't know whether she'd have anything to eat.

Through all of this, she was enchanted by her fellow refugees. Especially the ladies she calls Edelweiss, after the flower that blooms on icy glaciers where nothing else can live. These ladies shared information on where to get velvet curtains for making ballgowns during the emigration, just like Scarlet O'Hara. (I knew a Russian emigre lady who said they would never ever appear in an off the rack dress at a party, just because people were getting shot was no excuse to be badly dressed.)

She is willing to do what it takes. The lady who provides the travel pass from Moscow needs to be flattered. She is a Bolshevik with an elaborate coiffure. (Probably Olga Kameneva, Trotsky's sister who was shot in 1941.) And Teffi flatters that guy in the stolen boots, ooh such beautiful boots, only a great man has such boots...and gets her travel pass.

She goes to Odessa, but the Bolsheviks are coming, she wants to go to Vladivostok, that's her Russia where people can read what she writes. But the ship is not seaworthy and she's stuck in a port city called Novorossisk. Here she sees a tent city of Armenia refugees, worse off than the Russians. She is in demand in a nearby city where the White General Denikin wants to be entertained. She is a trooper. She entertains, bows, and then leaves Russia forever. Goes back to the port. The Armenians are gone. She gets on a ship to Constantinople never to see her beloved Russia ever again. (And what of the Armenians....???)

She writes this memoir as a tribute to ordinary people, although there is namedropping on absolutely every page. There is the hopeless idealist Olyonushka a vegetarian who cannot bear to eat meat, but steals bits off the plates of others. Olyonushka somehow is in love with Vladimir but thinks she should marry Dmitri because he is so helpless. But she somehow finds happiness.

Some people manage. Even in a failed state. There is a recurring theme of gemstones. Teffi likes rocks. One man has a black opal ring. He does not survive so well. But a sooty grimy stoker on the refugee ship starts to talk with Teffi. He reminds her of a yellow sapphire. What? The yellow sapphire? This proletarian had been at one of her soirees in St. Petersburg before the apocalypse, and enjoyed an evening discussing the fire in rare stones. Now he doesn't want her to reveal his aristocratic roots. But he remembers the real Russia. And he will survive.

Now I know why everyone love Teffi. I do too.

I had never heard of Teffi before seeing this collection of short stories from Pushkin Press, but she was a well-known literary figure in the years before the Revolution, with admirers such as Lenin, Bunin, Zoshchenko and Tsar Nicolas II. She was mainly known as a light, comic writer, but this collection has a nice range of styles and there were very few weak stories.

There are certainly some lighter, ironic social pieces – a man displaces his anger at his boss onto his family and it moves downward from there, another man tries to use willpower to conquer his alcoholism, a woman is excited to wear a new hat, a cheating wife is counseled by her friend to break it off, but finds a way around it. However, even in the first pre-Revolution section, there are more personal stories of quiet pains – a young girl is kept in the dark about her parents’ disintegrating marriage, another feels all the stabs of childhood jealousy.

Teffi’s prose is highly readable and some of her more experimental styles are used in stories that outwardly seem amusing, but contain darker elements. The long story on Rasputin is a breathless account of her experiences with the much-feared, much-discussed man. “Petrograd Monologue” is an almost stream-of-consciousness style as the narrator tries to distract herself from hunger by thinking of art, music, and beauty. The title story has Teffi’s friend revising her letter to friends back in the Soviet Union – things must be “subtly worded” or their friends could be arrested. There’s a clipped style and the revisions are silly – “Your brother Ivan” changes to “Your sister Ivan” and Teffi’s postscript goes from “My warmest greeting to all of you” to “To hell with the lot of you.” – but the threat is real.

The two overtly supernatural stories are otherwise strongly realistic and unhappy - in one a man has returned from the dead and his life in his former village is described, in the other the narrator is a charismatic, brilliant girl who falls on hard times during the Revolution and remembers a past preternatural experience at the right time.

The final stories, especially the last two, are feverishly unhappy and seem personal – “Thy Will” is about an artist who is gradually losing her mind, and in “And Time Was No More” the author imagines her death in a hallucinatory dream sequence.

This is an accomplished collection – hopefully there will be more translations of her work.