Subtly Worded and Other Stories Read online

  TEFFI

  SUBTLY WORDED

  AND OTHER STORIES

  Translated from the Russian by Anne Marie Jackson with Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Clare Kitson, Irina Steinberg and Natalia Wase

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Part I · Before the Revolution

  A Radiant Easter

  The Corsican

  Will-Power

  The Hat

  The Lifeless Beast

  Jealousy

  The Quiet Backwater

  Duty and Honour

  Part II · 1916–19: Rasputin, Revolution and Civil War

  Petrograd Monologue

  One Day in the Future

  One of Us

  Rasputin

  Part III · 1920s and 1930s in Paris

  Que Faire?

  Subtly Worded

  Marquita

  My First Tolstoy

  Heart of a Valkyrie

  Ernest with the Languages

  Part IV · 1930s: Magic Tales

  “The Kind that Walk”

  The Dog (A Story from a Stranger)

  Part V · Last Stories

  The Blind One

  Thy Will

  And Time Was No More

  Acknowledgements

  Also Available from Pushkin Press

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  IN THE YEARS before the Revolution, Teffi was a literary star. People quoted lines from her work in conversation. Strangers recognized her on the streets of St Petersburg. So broad was her appeal that her fans included such disparate figures as Vladimir Lenin and Tsar Nicholas II.1 As well as being popular with the reading public, Teffi was greatly admired by fellow writers such as Ivan Bunin, Fyodor Sologub and Mikhail Zoshchenko, to name but a few.

  Although she is still often seen primarily as a humorist, the scope of her work was, almost from the beginning, broader and deeper. As often as not, her stories are small tragedies. The greatest of Soviet humorists, Mikhail Zoshchenko, once wrote: “Just try retelling one of her stories, even the funniest, and it will no longer be funny. It will come out absurd, maybe even tragic.”2 Or, in the words of the Russian critic Lidiya Spiridonova, Teffi’s stories are “funny on the outside, tragic on the inside”.3

  Teffi, or Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, was born in 1872 into a prominent St Petersburg family. Her father was an eminent criminologist and a gifted raconteur, her mother a cultured woman who loved literature and passed this love on to her children. Along with her sisters and brother, Teffi was immersed in books and writing from an early age. Teffi’s older sister was the well-known poet Mirra Lokhvitskaya, dubbed the “Russian Sappho” by Ivan Bunin. Her other sisters were also published writers. Around 1890 Teffi married and went to live with her husband in the provinces, where they had three children. A decade later, however, she left her family and returned to St Petersburg. As Teffi wrote to her elder daughter in 1946, if she had remained in the marriage it would have been the end of her.

  Later, as an émigrée in Paris, Teffi explained the origin of her pseudonym. She had written a play, but people kept telling her that no one would even read it unless she had theatre contacts or a big name. She felt she needed to come up with an attention-grabbing pen name, a name that might belong to either a man or a woman. When she cast about for the name of a fool—because fools were believed to be lucky—a certain Stefan came to mind, called “Steffi” by his friends. Out of delicacy, she got rid of the initial S and arrived at “Teffi”. When the press first encountered this pen name, someone assumed it was an allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s character “Taffy”. The explanation stuck and Teffi did little to discourage it.

  Teffi’s first publication—a poem—appeared in 1901, but it was not until 1904 that her work began appearing with any regularity. Her satirical articles were published in a broad range of periodicals, and in 1905 she even contributed briefly to a Bolshevik newspaper. Teffi was closely associated with the journal Satyricon (New Satyricon after 1913) and the daily newspaper The Russian Word.4 The Russian Word usually published literature only in its holiday editions, but Teffi recalls in her memoirs that the editor Vlas Doroshevich interceded on her behalf, saying, “Let her write what she wants to write. You don’t use a pure-bred Arab to haul water.” Gradually articles gave way to fiction and, by 1911, Teffi was publishing mostly short stories.

  The political reforms of 1905 had been followed by a conservative backlash; even schoolchildren were often arrested. Such absurdities furnished material for Teffi’s prose collection Humorous Stories, one volume of which was published in 1910, followed by another in 1911. Humorous Stories was so successful that it was reissued three times in quick succession. Similar success would accompany Teffi throughout her literary career.

  In this, as in later collections, Teffi usually writes about ordinary people, whose folly she ridicules but for whom she retains a certain tenderness. ‘The Corsican’ is about a police agent trying to learn revolutionary songs so that he can become an agent provocateur and thus improve his career prospects. In ‘A Radiant Easter’, a parody of a recognized genre of sentimental and moralistic Easter stories, a petty official attempts to make a good impression on his boss, but the plan backfires. Teffi regarded marriage with a certain scepticism, and ‘Duty and Honour’, first published in the collection Carousel in 1913, pokes fun at the banality of a woman attempting to enforce a friend’s adherence to convention.

  One day Teffi received a three-layered box of candies from an anonymous admirer. They were in colourful wrappers, each emblazoned with her pen name and portrait. Overjoyed, she telephoned her friends, inviting them round to sample the “Teffi” candies. She began sampling them herself and, before she realized it, had devoured nearly all three layers. “I had gorged on fame until I’d made myself ill. That’s when I understood its flip side. […] Instead of happily celebrating with my friends, I had to invite a doctor round.”5 From then on, she appears to have remained indifferent to the trappings of her celebrity.

  The Lifeless Beast (1916) is generally seen as the most accomplished collection that Teffi published before emigrating. In the preface she warned readers expecting light-hearted humour that “this book contains a great deal that isn’t cheerful”. ‘The Quiet Backwater’ rivals Chekhov at his best in its evocation of the language and mindset of an elderly peasant couple. Many years before, while her husband was away fighting, the wife had borne an illegitimate child. Teffi’s evocation of the silences and evasions that enable them to cope with this threat to their marriage is extraordinarily subtle. The title story, ‘The Lifeless Beast’, is told from the perspective of a young child all but forgotten amid the collapse of her parents’ marriage. The child’s world is inhabited almost entirely by beasts of one kind or another—animate and inanimate, animal and human. In ‘Jealousy’ a little girl, distressed by the attention her nanny is paying to another little girl, first wishes this girl to die and then determines to die herself. Robert Chandler writes, “Like Andrei Platonov, Teffi has a remarkable ability to evoke the inner world of a child. And like Platonov, she knows how fluid the boundary between life and death can seem to a child”:

  Liza went round the lime tree, scrambling over its stout roots. In among these roots was plenty to catch the eye. In one little corner lived a dead beetle. Its wings were like the dried husks inside a cedar nut. Liza flipped the beetle onto its back with a little stick, and then onto its front, but it wasn’t afraid and didn’t run away. It was completely dead and living a peaceful life.

  In 1916 Teffi was invited to two dinners a
ttended by Rasputin. Later, in Paris, she wrote a vivid account of these meetings, all the more remarkable for the way she manages—in spite of the horror Rasputin evoked in her—to release him from cliché.

  Many of Teffi’s stories and articles from the period of the Revolution and the Civil War have only recently been published in book form. Several of these pieces are included here. In ‘Petrograd Monologue’, Teffi manages to write with humour about the terrible food shortage of these years. “Funny on the outside, tragic on the inside” indeed! Social class is central to ‘One of Us’, in which a promising acquaintance between two balletomanes is nipped in the bud; even in 1918 there was evidently no escape from snobbery. And in ‘One Day in the Future’ (written and published in the St Petersburg journal New Satyricon not long before it was closed down) class snobbery is turned on its head; the story portrays a world in which knowledge and ability are spurned in favour of membership in the ranks of the proletariat.

  In 1919, following the closure of The Russian Word, Teffi left St Petersburg to go on tour in Ukraine. She never saw Russia again. As the Bolsheviks continued to advance, Teffi was evacuated first from Kiev, then from Odessa, then from Novorossiysk. After passing, like so many other émigrés, through Constantinople, she ended up in Paris, settling there in 1920.

  Teffi quickly became a major figure in the émigré world. ‘Que Faire?’—her first feuilleton published in Paris—was a huge hit and still remains one of her best-known works. Teffi’s title alludes to Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done, a phrase later put to use by Lenin as a revolutionary slogan. Teffi reverses the implication by putting the words into the mouth of a White general. They quickly became a catchphrase among émigrés. Full of clever interlingual word play, ‘Que Faire?’ brilliantly portrays the squabbling Russian émigré community, unable to find any kind of internal solidarity:

  We—les russes, as they call us—live the strangest of lives here, nothing like other people’s. We stick together, for example, not like planets, by mutual attraction, but by a force quite contrary to the laws of physics—mutual repulsion. Every lesrusse hates all the others—hates them just as fervently as the others hate him.

  The blackly humorous ‘Subtly Worded’, from Teffi’s 1923 collection Lynx, captures the anxiety people were experiencing with regard to what was happening back in Russia. A comparison of ‘Subtly Worded’ with Teffi’s earlier letter-writing story, ‘Duty and Honour’, reveals a great deal about just how much both Teffi and Russia had changed over the intervening decade.

  The collection Gorodok was published in 1927. A gorodok—or “little town”—is essentially what the émigré community had become: a little town within the confines of Paris that refused to integrate into its host society. Rather, it sought to “preserve the values and traditions of Russian culture”6 in anticipation of going home, and carried on doing so even after any such hopes had faded. In this little town we find Sashenka, a young mother who nightly appears as “Marquita”, performing Spanish songs in a café where all the waitresses are “daughters of provincial governors”. She ruins her chances of a good marriage when she mistakenly accepts a friend’s advice to pretend to be a femme fatale. As Robert Chandler remarks:

  Many writers have written about people pretending to be better than they really are; Teffi, with characteristic originality, shows us a woman who inadvertently ruins her chance of a better life by consciously pretending to be worse than she really is.

  Like the majority of the Russian émigrés in Paris, Teffi did not expect to remain in exile from her homeland. As hope gave way to resignation, a new theme entered Teffi’s work: nostalgia. She contemplated not only a world left behind, but a way of life that no longer existed. ‘Ernest with the Languages’ comes from a trio of stories about private tutors on Russian country estates. Other stories from these years are autobiographical: in ‘My First Tolstoy’ the young Teffi pays a visit to Leo Tolstoy to plead her case for saving the life of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.

  When asked in 1943 which of her works she most valued, Teffi named her collection Witch. “This book,” she writes, “contains our ancient Slavic gods, the way they exist even now in the people’s psyche—in legends, superstitions, customs. It’s all as I found it, in the Russian provinces, as a child.”7 In ‘The Kind that Walk’ a Jewish carpenter who returns to a village after an absence of thirty years is viewed by the peasants as one of the living dead. ‘The Dog’ is set against the background of the First World War and, in the words of Robert Chandler:

  it provides a fine example of a writer drawing on folklore not for ornament but as a source of psychological truth. Just as D.H. Lawrence sometimes draws on the paranormal, so Teffi draws on folklore to convey how, at moments of crisis, we can be overwhelmed by the most primitive aspects of the psyche.8

  Teffi remained in occupied Paris throughout the war. When the émigré newspapers and journals were shut down she lost her only source of income; her difficulties were compounded by the tendency of Western critics—many of whom were at least to some degree pro-Soviet—to dismiss Russian émigré literature.9 While she was not exactly left to starve, the gifts that Teffi received from fans and supporters were often somewhat impractical. She once wrote to her daughter about a lady who wanted to send her a velvet dressing gown for her name day, and another who sent her 3,000 francs for a new umbrella, although she already had one that was perfectly serviceable.

  Deteriorating health notwithstanding, Teffi continued to give occasional readings during these years. Ever-dwindling audiences, however, attested to the attrition of the Russian community in Paris. In 1945 Teffi’s own death was rumoured; one New York journal even published her obituary. Teffi laid these rumours to rest in a letter-feuilleton which eloquently summed up the state of émigré Paris at the time. After expressing her regret that there was not yet a recognized etiquette for such letters, she suggested that such an etiquette was sure to be established soon: one was, after all, only too often bumping into people whose departure from life had already been noted in prayers and obituaries. She went on to say that this was actually a most rational phenomenon, as:

  it is now more normal to die than to live. Can someone who is weak, elderly and ailing really be expected to survive the winter—in an unheated building, on a hungry stomach, with the wail of sirens and the roar of bombs, and in a state of grief and despair? […] Of course not! Obviously he has died!10

  Earthly Rainbow, Teffi’s final collection, was published in 1952, the year Teffi really did die. Shortly before her death she wrote, “An anecdote is funny when it’s being told, but when someone lives it, it’s a tragedy. And my life has been sheer anecdote, that is—a tragedy.”11 Parallels can be drawn between Teffi’s own suffering and that of her character Anna Brown, the pianist in ‘Thy Will’. Both Teffi and Anna seem to come to a recognition that there is no controlling the pain in the world. Only days, perhaps hours, before Teffi died, in great pain and no longer able to speak, she scrawled onto a sheet of paper: “There is no love greater than that of someone giving his own morphine to his brother.”12 Like a true friend, Teffi shares her morphine with Anna Brown. ‘The Blind One’, one of Teffi’s favourites in this collection,13 juxtaposes the self-inflicted misery of a well-to-do woman with the joy and buoyancy of a poor blind girl from the neighbouring orphanage. The blind girl’s ability to “see” the beauty around her—on a “wan […] tear-stained” day, beside a sea that is “utterly stagnant and dead”—seems to mirror Teffi’s own ability to see what is wonderful in the most unlikely of places. The present collection closes with the extraordinary ‘And Time Was No More’, narrated by a fictive Teffi. Following an injection of morphine, this Teffi opens her eyes to find herself in a little house that she used to draw as a child. This begins a sequence of memories, dreams and illuminations into the nature of death, the soul and eternity. It is a kind of summing up of Teffi’s spiritual life as she prepares to depart her earthly existence.

  Teffi died on 6 October 19
52. She was buried in the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.

  The poet and critic Georgy Ivanov described Teffi as “an inimitable presence in Russian literature, a genuine wonder” and predicted that she would still be “amazing readers a hundred years from now”.14 Unfortunately, following Teffi’s death, she fell off the literary map. There are several possible explanations: she was a woman; she had been typecast as a lightweight humorist; she was an émigrée. But beginning in the 1990s, nearly half a century after Teffi’s death, a new generation of Russian readers began to discover and appreciate Teffi’s special genius. Georgy Ivanov—now himself becoming recognized as one of the greatest Russian poets of the last century—was right. Teffi’s time has come—or rather, her time has come again.

  ANNE MARIE JACKSON

  Notes

  1 When a literary anthology was being prepared to commemorate the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty, Tsar Nicholas II was consulted as to which contemporary writers should be included. His response was: “Teffi! Only Teffi!” See O.N. Mikhailov, ‘Nezhny talant’, in O.N. Mikhailov, D.D. Nikolayev and E.N. Trubilova (eds), Tvorchestvo N.A. Teffi i russky literaturny protsess pervoy poloviny XX veka (Moscow: Nasledie, 1999), p. 5.

  2 M.M. Zoshchenko, ‘N. Teffi’, in Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 1972 god (Leningrad: Nauka, 1974), p. 141.

  3 L.A. Spiridonova, ‘Teffi’, in Russkaya satiricheskaya literatura nachala XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), p. 162.

  4 Teffi worked for The Russian Word (Russkoye Slovo) until the Bolsheviks closed it down in 1918. By 1917 it had achieved a circulation in excess of 1 million, making it one of the world’s largest papers. See Louise McReynolds, ‘Newspapers and public opinion’, in Between Tsar and People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 241.