Memories Read online

  TEFFI (1872–1952) was the pen name of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, born in St. Petersburg into a distinguished family that treasured literature. She and her three sisters all became writers. Teffi wrote in a variety of styles and genres: political feuilletons published in a Bolshevik newspaper during her brief period of radical fervor after the 1905 Revolution; Symbolist poems that she declaimed or sang in Petersburg literary salons; popular one-act plays, mostly humorous or satirical—one was entitled The Woman Question; and a novel titled simply Adventure Novel. Her finest works are her short stories and Memories, a witty, tragic, and deeply perceptive account of her last journey across Russia and what is now Ukraine, before going by boat to Istanbul in the summer of 1919. Teffi was widely read; her admirers included not only such writers as Bunin, Bulgakov, and Zoshchenko, but also both Lenin and the last tsar. In pre-Revolutionary Russia, candies and perfumes were named after her; after the Revolution, her stories were published and her plays performed throughout the Russian diaspora. She died in Paris.

  ROBERT CHANDLER’s translations from Russian include Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (an NYRB classic); Nikolay Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; Vasily Grossman’s An Armenian Sketchbook, Everything Flows, Life and Fate, and The Road (all NYRB classics); and Hamid Ismailov’s Central Asian novel, The Railway. His co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won prizes both in the UK and in the US. He is the editor and main translator of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov. Together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski he has co-edited The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. He has also translated selections of Sappho and Apollinaire. As well as running regular translation workshops in London and teaching the annual Translate in the City literary translation course, he works as a mentor for the British Centre for Literary Translation.

  ELIZABETH CHANDLER is a co-translator, with Robert Chandler, of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and of several titles by Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman.

  ANNE MARIE JACKSON has lived for extended periods in Russia and Moldova. She is a co-translator, with Robert Chandler and Rose France, of Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi (available as an NYRB classic). Her previous translations include works by Alexei Nikitin, Maxim Osipov, and Olga Slavnikova.

  IRINA STEINBERG was born in Moscow in 1983. She emigrated to England with her family at the age of eight and now lives primarily in London. She has a BA in English language and literature from University College London, as well as postgraduate qualifications in law. She started pursuing her interest in translation professionally in her late twenties and was a co-translator of Teffi’s Subtly Worded and Other Stories (2014).

  EDYTHE HABER is Professor Emerita of Russian at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a Center Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Mikhail Bulgakov: The Early Years (1998) and of many articles on Russian literature, particularly on Bulgakov, Teffi, and Vladimir Nabokov. She is presently completing a critical biography of Teffi.

  MEMORIES

  From Moscow to the Black Sea

  TEFFI

  Translated from the Russian by

  ROBERT and ELIZABETH CHANDLER,

  ANNE MARIE JACKSON, and IRINA STEINBERG

  Introduction by

  EDYTHE HABER

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © Agnès Szydlowski

  Translation copyright © 2016 by Robert Chandler and Irina Steinberg

  Introduction copyright © 2016 by Edythe Haber

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Natalia Goncharova, Rayonism, Blue-Green Forest (detail), 1913; © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris; Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Author photo courtesy of Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Bakhmeteff Archive, the Nadezhda Teffi Papers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Tėffi, N. A. (Nadezhda Aleksandrovna), 1872–1952, author. | Chandler, Robert, 1953– translator. | Chandler, Elizabeth, 1947– translator. | Jackson, Anne Marie, translator. | Steinberg, Irina, translator. | Haber, Edythe C., writer of introduction.

  Title: Memories : from Moscow to the Black Sea / by Teffi ; translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Anne-Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg ; introduction by Edythe Haber.

  Other titles: Vospominaniia. English | New York Review Books classics.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2016. | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015043142 | ISBN 9781590179512 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Tėffi, N. A. (Nadezhda Aleksandrovna), 1872–1952. | Women authors, Russian—20th century—Biography. | Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Personal narratives.

  Classification: LCC PG3453.B8 Z4613 2016 | DDC 891.73/42—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043142

  ISBN 978-1-59017-952-9

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  MEMORIES

  Map of Teffi’s Journey

  Appendix: The Last Breakfast

  Translator’s Note

  Further Reading

  Notes

  BEFORE A MAP OF RUSSIA

  In a strange house, in a faraway land,

  her portrait hangs on the wall;

  she herself is dying like a beggar woman,

  lying on straw, in pain that can’t be told.

  But here she looks as she always did look:

  young, rich, and draped

  in that luxurious green cloak

  in which she was always portrayed.

  I gaze at your countenance as if at an icon . . .

  “Blessed be your name, slaughtered Rus!”

  I quietly touch your cloak with one hand;

  and with that same hand make the sign of the cross.

  —TEFFI

  translated by Robert Chandler

  INTRODUCTION

  TEFFI, commenting in 1918 on the savage civil war that was decimating the Russian Empire in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution, put the blame squarely on the devil. Russia had improbably held together for so many centuries, she wrote:

  But suddenly some wily devil poked his stick somewhere near Moscow and began spinning Russia like a whirlwind top. “Whee-ee-ee!” The pieces are flying in various directions like sparks. The Crimea! The Caucasus! Poland! Little Russia! Lithuania! Finland! The Baltic region! Siberia! Kazan! Whee-ee-ee! More! More! Cities! Seas! Kingdoms! Principalities! Free lands! More! More! Soon only the stick will remain . . . [1]

  Teffi was at the time one of the most widely read and beloved of Russia’s writers. As one émigré commenter asserted: “There was scarcely ever another writer in Russia who had such an enormous circle of readers as Teffi.” He added that, although she published almost exclusively in the liberal press, “both Russias” read her and she was a favorite of the last tsar, Nikolai II[2] (as she was of his Bolshevik successor, Vladimir Lenin). Her celebrity reached such heights that there even existed Teffi Perfume and Teffi Candies.

  Teffi (pseudonym of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya) was born in 1872
into a distinguished St. Petersburg family. Her father, Alexander Lokhvitsky, was a professor of law and much published writer both in the academic and popular press, who, after the legal reforms of Tsar Alexander II in the 1860s, became a celebrated criminal lawyer. Teffi noted that he was “renowned for his wit”—a gift inherited by his daughter.[3] The second youngest of six children (five girls and one boy), she recalled that all her siblings wrote poetry[4]—and no less than four of the sisters became professional writers. One of them, Mirra Lokhvitskaya, achieved renown as a poet before her early death in 1905. Known as the Russian Sappho, she introduced unbridled female sexuality into Russian poetry and had close ties to the decadents and Symbolists. The only boy, Nikolai, pursued a military career and during World War I led the Russian expeditionary force to France, rising to the rank of lieutenant general.

  Teffi’s own writing career was delayed by her short and unhappy marriage to Wladyslav Buczynski, a Polish graduate of the St. Petersburg Law School and a landowner. They wed around 1890 and separated less than a decade later when Teffi abandoned her family at her husband’s estate in the Mogilev Province (now in Belarus) and returned to St. Petersburg to pursue her literary calling. In 1901 her first publication—a serious poem that she herself judged “dreadful”—appeared under her maiden name, N. Lokhvitskaya.[5] After publishing two more unexceptionable lyrical poems, at the end of 1901 her first satirical verses came out and for the first time she adopted the pseudonym Teffi.[6] For the next couple of years she signed her serious work with her real name—usually her married name, N. Buchinskaya—and her humorous pieces Teffi, but by 1904 she used her pseudonym exclusively.

  By 1903 Teffi was reaching a broader audience, her feuilletons, stories, and verse (both satiric and serious) appearing regularly in the popular Petersburg newspaper, Birzhevye vedomosti (The Stock Exchange Gazette), as well as in other broad circulation newspapers and magazines. In 1907 her activities spread to the theater when her one-act play, The Woman Question, was successfully staged at St. Petersburg’s Suvorin Theater.[7] It was followed by many more theatrical miniatures, which enjoyed great popularity over the next decade in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and throughout the Russian Empire. In addition, Teffi’s talents extended to music. She wrote many songs—sometimes both words and music, at other times only the lyrics. These she sang to the accompaniment of her guitar (which she tenderly eulogizes in Memories) and many became part of the repertoire of well-known performers.

  It has been said that Teffi invented her own genre—“the feuilleton that got by without politics”[8]—but this was not always the case. She, like many writers and intellectuals, actively supported the 1905 Revolution and she had quite close ties to the Bolsheviks. In March 1905, her poem “Banner of Freedom” (later entitled “The Bees”) came out in the Geneva Bolshevik newspaper, Vpered (Forward).[9] In October, after the tsar issued his manifesto guaranteeing certain civil liberties including freedom of the press, Teffi wrote for the first legal Bolshevik newspaper allowed in Russia, Novaia zhizn’ (New Life). The newspaper’s literary contributors included a diverse collection of contemporary writers, ranging from the Symbolist Konstantin Balmont, to the realist Ivan Bunin, to the revolutionary Maksim Gorky, but Teffi was more deeply involved than most. She served as one of three non-Party members on the editorial board, who all, according to one of the Bolshevik participants, “made themselves out at the time to be Marxists or Marxist-leaning [marksistvuiushchikh].”[10]

  In the first issue of Novaia zhizn’, Teffi’s sketch, “October 18,” vividly depicts—using visual iconography common in revolutionary art—the masses united in a “mighty and triumphant procession,” their red banners outlined against the sky “like gigantic dark streams of resurrected triumphant blood.”[11] She pictures the unity of all classes: “A soldier, a lady in white gloves, a worker, an officer,” etc., and at the end returns to the banners, which “lead their people, their great host, forward, through the black night, to a new dawn, to a new life.” Teffi published several more pieces in Novaia zhizn’, but relations between the literary staff and the Bolsheviks, strained from the start, became worse when Lenin arrived from exile in November 1905. Finally, when Novaia zhizn’ became no more than a Party organ, the entire literary section, including Teffi, resigned. This negative experience left a permanent mark, and accounts for her hostility toward the Bolsheviks—and Lenin in particular—in 1917.[12]

  Between 1906 and 1908 Teffi’s political satire continued to appear in other opposition periodicals, but with time it grew milder, due in part to greater government restrictions, but also, no doubt, to fading revolutionary fervor. Russia was tired of all that solemnity, she wrote in 1910, and was longing for laughter:

  Laughter is now in style [. . .] Books of humor go through three editions in three or four months and demand for them keeps rising. Humor magazines are alluded to even in speeches delivered under the bell of the State Duma. Theatrical entrepreneurs are longing for a good merry comedy and beg tearfully, “Why, write something, the kind of thing that makes your throat begin to tickle with laughter!”[13]

  The demand for laughter coincided perfectly with Teffi’s special gift, and it accounts for the renown she achieved during her final decade in Russia. The first print organ that spread her fame was Satirikon (Satyricon), the best Russian humor magazine of the early twentieth century, conceived of in 1908 by Arkady Averchenko (who in Memories is Teffi’s traveling companion from Moscow to Kiev). With its very talented staff of writers and artists, Satirikon was a resounding success, and Teffi and Averchenko became its most celebrated writers. Her popularity grew still greater in 1909 when she became a feuilletonist for the Moscow-based Russkoe slovo (Russian Word), the most widely read and highly regarded newspaper in Russia, whose circulation reached over a million by 1917. Her Sunday columns—which included both topical feuilletons and stories—appeared in Russkoe slovo until it was closed by the Bolsheviks in 1917.

  Teffi published her first books in 1910, and they reflect the two sides of her talent. The first, Seven Fires, is a volume of poetry plus a play written in orientalized prose; the second was entitled Humorous Stories.[14] The poetry received mixed reviews, but the stories were universally praised by critics, both in the elite and popular press. Mikhail Kuzmin, in his review in the prestigious Apollon (Apollo), favorably contrasted Teffi’s natural Russian humor in the Chekhov manner to the “fantastic lack of verisimilitude” of Averchenko’s “American” variety.[15] Teffi published no more books of poetry in Russia, but Humorous Stories was followed almost yearly by new prose collections, all of which were published in multiple editions and highly praised by critics, who often deemed Teffi the best humorous writer of the time. Typical are a reviewer’s comments on her 1914 collection, Smoke without Fire; asserting that Teffi “undoubtedly occupies first place” among contemporary humorists, he declared her humor “purely Russian, sly and good-natured,” and concluded: “Teffi’s style is refined and simple, the dialogue—her favorite form—is lively and unforced; the action unfolds quickly, without superfluous details, and sincere merriment is effortlessly conveyed to the reader.”[16] Some critics noted the sadness intermingled with Teffi’s comedy, her “almost elegiac humor” depicting “gray, everyday life. . . .”[17] Her more somber side is reflected particularly in The Lifeless Beast (1915), her best collection of the teens, in which the serious mood predominates. Teffi’s position as a woman writer—and more unusually, a woman humorist—aroused contradictory responses. One critic found “something typically feminine in that observant mockery with which she illuminates every trifle of everyday life,” whereas her fellow Satyriconian, Arkady Bukhov, distinguished her from the usual run of despised women writers: “In general Teffi writes so cleverly and beautifully that even her enemies would not call her a woman writer.”[18]

  During the revolutionary year of 1917, political events began again to figure centrally in Teffi’s stories and feuilletons. Exultation over the February Revolution and the overt
hrow of the monarchy is reflected in the story “The Average Man,” whose title character is now able to shout fearlessly “the policeman is a fool.” He explains to his wife: “I felt like it and I screamed. That’s the way I am. I! The free citizen Gerasim Ivanych Shchurkin.”[19] Such optimism was not to last long, however, in part because of the Provisional Government’s inability to implement its liberal program during wartime, but, on a more fundamental level, because Teffi’s dream of class unity, expressed in 1905, was clearly unrealizable. In a June 1917 feuilleton titled “Deserters,” she criticized the intelligentsia for their anxiety over the violent unrest among the peasantry. She accused them of expecting a miracle—that “the same people [narod] who for centuries were stupefied with vodka, oppressed, crushed by lack of rights, by illiteracy, poverty, superstition, and hunger,” would at once reveal “a great and shining soul. . . .”[20] Acknowledging the outrages, she nevertheless branded as “deserters” those who wished to avoid “participation in the difficult and great exploit of building a new life.” Even if their worst fears prove to be justified, she concludes, “and instead of a triumphal chariot only black corpses will be driven along our great path, may each one of us be able to say: ‘My forces were weak and small, but I gave of them totally. And I did not renounce and did not flee. I was not a deserter!’ ”[21]

  Teffi’s revolutionary sympathies, however, emphatically did not extend to the Bolsheviks. Her disdain for Lenin and his party, which dated back to 1905, is expressed powerfully in a feuilleton of late June 1917, in which she gave a withering portrait of Lenin: “Average height, gray complexion, completely ‘ordinary.’ Only his forehead is not good, very prominent, stubborn, heavy, not inspired, not seeking, not creative. . . .” The “sincere and honest preacher of the great religion of socialism” (as she rather surprising calls him) lacks “the fiery tongue of the gift of the Holy Spirit . . . , there is no inspiration in him, no flight, and no fire.”[22] For Lenin’s followers she expressed unadulterated contempt, but at once makes clear that she has not rejected socialism as such: “Leninists, Bolsheviks, anarchists and communists, thugs, registered housebreakers—what a muddle! What a Satanic vinaigrette! What immense work—to raise once more and cleanse from all this garbage the great idea of socialism!”