Rasputin and Other Ironies Read online

  Praise for Subtly Worded

  ‘A gifted satirist and social observer… her precise voice is her own and this mercurial volume is a singular prism to not so much a lost world as to a changing culture that learned to adapt without ever forgetting the past’

  EILEEN BATTERSBY, Irish Times

  ‘Teffi can write in more registers than you might think, and is capable of being heartbreaking as well as very funny. I wish she were still alive, and I could have met her… I can’t recommend her strongly enough’

  NICHOLAS LEZARD, Guardian

  ‘Teffi’s brilliance at capturing the dark comedy of her milieu should no longer prevent her from being recognized as an important European writer’

  TLS

  ‘Teffi was not only a great wit and an impeccable stylist, but one of the twentieth century’s most perceptive and clear-headed observers’

  PEN Atlas

  ‘The characters pop off the page with a flick of the pen. Teffi… turned out finely engraved sentences that achieved their effects economically’

  New York Times

  Praise for Memories–From Moscow to the Black Sea

  ‘I never imagined such a memoir could be possible, especially about the Russian Civil War. Teffi wears her wisdom lightly, observing farce and foible amid the looming tragedy, in this enthralling book’

  ANTONY BEEVOR

  ‘A vividly idiosyncratic personal account of the disintegration – moral, political, strategic – of Tsarist Russia after the Revolution, as alive to the farcical and the ridiculous as it is to the tragic; a bit like what Chekhov might have written if he had lived to experience it’

  MICHAEL FRAYN

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction: Teffi the Fool

  A Note on the Texts

  PART I · How I Live and Work

  How I Live and Work

  My Pseudonym

  My First Visit to an Editorial Office

  PART II · Staging Posts

  Liza

  Love

  The Green Devil

  Valya

  Staging Posts

  The White Flower

  PART III · Heady Days: Revolutions and Civil War

  New Life

  Rasputin

  We Are Still Living

  The Gadarene Swine

  PART IV · Artists and Writers Remembered

  My First Tolstoy

  The Merezhkovskys

  Ilya Repin

  List of Historical Figures

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Teffi the Fool

  Teffi was a writer of astonishing, fearless intelligence. There was little, if anything, that she did not see through. No other writer, for example, has evoked the plight of the White refugees from “Sovietdom” as vividly, and with such insight, as Teffi in “The Gadarene Swine”. In this article, probably her penultimate publication on Russian soil, Teffi lets slip her mask of light humorist—and the result is terrifying. “The Gadarene Swine” was published in Odessa in March 1919, just over a month before the Whites evacuated the city, and it was not republished until 2006. It is hard to imagine any émigré journal intrepid enough to republish anything so mercilessly critical of the Whites.

  Teffi was secretive and self-protective. She consistently lied about when she was born, shaving thirteen years off her age. She wrote a substantial amount of apparently autobiographical work, but without ever mentioning several of the most important events of her life. She does not tell us that a jealous admirer shot, and nearly killed, one of her lovers. Nor does she mention her second marriage, nor does she ever speak, even obliquely, of the infant son whom she abandoned when she left her husband to return to Petersburg and begin her career as a writer. All this, of course, is entirely understandable. If it surprises us, it is only because Teffi creates such a powerful illusion, when she writes in the first person, that she is chatting away entirely freely and spontaneously.

  Teffi’s most important act of self-protection, however, was her adoption of the mask of a fool. Had she written many articles in the vein of “The Gadarene Swine”, she would have had few friends and few readers. She understood that intelligence as sharp as hers can be frightening, and, like a Shakespearean fool, she found a way to smuggle her insights into the public world without getting herself executed or lynched. She did this with remarkable skill; she was a true juggler, a tumbler. While in Russia, she wrote exclusively for the liberal press yet was the favourite writer of the last tsar—as well as being admired by Lenin. And many of the sketches she published as an émigrée in Paris were reprinted, without her permission, in Soviet Russia. Few Russian writers of the time were able to cross so many boundaries.

  Teffi knew what she was about. In “My Pseudonym” she tells us that she chose as her pseudonym the name of a fool whom she knew—because fools are lucky. This was at a time when pseudonyms were used more often than they are today. But as she herself reminds us, other writers chose names with an obvious message—like Maxim Gorky, that is, Maxim the Bitter. Or, like Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova, they chose names with a dramatic ring. No other major writer chose a name as silly as Teffi.

  There were times when Teffi seems to have resented that she had come to be seen exclusively as a comic writer. As early as 1916 she was insisting on the tragic element in her work. And yet she may also have felt that, in order to be able to write at all, she had to pretend—to herself as well as to others—that her writing was nothing so very serious. There is a striking similarity between her account, in “My Pseudonym”, of the first night of the very first of her plays to be staged, and her account, in Memories—From Moscow to the Black Sea, of the last time she attended a performance of her own work on Russian soil. Both accounts end with a description of an enthusiastic audience calling for “the author” to take her bow and Teffi being unable, or somehow strangely reluctant, to accept the tribute that was her due. It is as if she felt that she might be unable to write at all if she took herself too seriously, that it was better to pretend that her work simply wrote itself.

  Teffi’s mask served her well. She survived the Russian Civil War, the difficulties of life as an émigrée, and the German occupation of France. She lived to be eighty, continuing to write until her last months. But it is time we reassessed her work, without preconceptions. She is always perceptively witty and she wrote thoughtfully about the power of laughter—but she is not the light humorist that Russians and Russianists still sometimes imagine her to be.

  In this volume we present not just one other Teffi, but several. Her range of both tone and subject matter is astonishing. She evokes the inner world of children with as much insight as any writer I know. “Love” is a masterpiece of poetic, modernist prose. She wrote poetry throughout her career and, like several of the very greatest Russian prose writers—Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Bunin, Andrei Platonov and Varlam Shalamov among them—she unobtrusively brings to her prose all that she had learnt as a poet. And her portraits of such figures as Lenin and Rasputin are unforgettable.

  Robert Chandler

  January 2016

  A Note on the Texts

  Teffi’s account of her unplanned emigration from Russia, published in English as Memories—From Moscow to the Black Sea, is often seen as her masterpiece. Gathered here is a selection of her shorter reminiscences, ranging from her childhood in 1870s Russia to the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s.

  After she left Russia in 1919, Teffi’s longing for that lost world led her to turn to the past in much of her writing. As she puts it in her 1927 collection, The Small Town (Gorodok):

  Our way of life in o
ur ruined Atlantis […] is fading from memory. […] From time to time the sea seems to toss out an unexpected shard, scrap, fragment from this world, this world submerged and lost for evermore, and you begin to examine it with sadness and tenderness, and you remember what the shard used to be like, the whole it was once part of, its role in life—whether to serve, teach, or simply entertain and delight.

  And always a shard like this will hook onto your soul and pull it back into the past.

  Teffi may also have looked to the past because she felt, as her biographer Edythe Haber describes it, “unable to penetrate the inner life of the French”. In a feuilleton in the émigré newspaper Vozrozhdenie, Teffi wrote that she would never be able to “speak, think and act” on behalf of a French person the way she could on behalf of a Russian.

  The first section of this collection, “How I Live and Work”, affords us a few glimpses of Teffi’s life as a writer. The pieces in the second section, “Staging Posts” – mostly written in the 1920s – show us something of Teffi’s personal life, from childhood and adolescence through to motherhood, emigration and life in Paris. “Staging Posts” itself, the most clearly fictionalized of these writings, alludes to a real episode that also figures in Memories, the death of her beloved younger sister Lena; and “The White Flower” evokes Teffi’s first years as an émigrée.

  Most of the accounts in the final two sections of this volume—“Heady Days: Revolutions and Civil War” and “Artists and Writers Remembered”—come from My Chronicle, Teffi’s final collection, unpublished during her lifetime. In her preface, Teffi wrote that many interesting people had passed through her life and that her intention was to show them “simply as real people”, since few others were likely to portray them this way. “We Are Still Living” and “The Gadarene Swine” were written at the time of the events they describe. The former dates to 1918, before Teffi had left the city she would always call Petersburg, even though after the outbreak of the First World War it had officially been given the more Slavic name of Petrograd, and the latter to the Russian Civil War, when Teffi was “rolling her way down the map”, along with thousands of others, before leaving Russia for ever.

  Anne Marie Jackson

  January 2016

  PART I

  How I Live and Work

  How I Live and Work

  Many people find it surprising that I live somewhere so busy, right opposite Montparnasse station. But it’s what I like. I adore Paris. I like to hear it here beside me—knocking, honking, ringing and breathing. Sometimes, at dawn, a lorry rumbles past beneath my window so loud and so close that it seems to be coming straight through my room, and I draw up my legs in my sleep so they won’t be run over. And then what wakes me an hour or two later is Paris itself—dear, elegant, beautiful Paris. Far better than being woken by some bewhiskered old crone of a concierge, with the eyes of a cockroach.

  Many people ask if it’s possible for a small pension to provide one with complete comfort. To which I modestly reply, “Well, I wouldn’t say quite complete.”

  Is it this little table you’re looking at? Yes, I know it’s very small, but there’s nothing it doesn’t do. It’s a writing table, a dining table, a dressing table and a sewing table. It’s only three and a half feet across, but on it I have an inkwell, some writing paper, my face powder, some envelopes, my sewing box, a cup of milk, some flowers, a Bible, sweets, manuscripts and some bottles of scent. In layers, like geological strata. The Augean table. Remember how Hercules had to clean the Augean stables? Well, if Augeas’s stables were in such a state, what do you think his writing table would have been like? Probably just like mine. So, how do I write? I put the cup of milk, the Bible and the bottles of scent on the bed, while the sewing box falls of its own accord onto the floor. I need to keep everything essential close at hand—and anyway there’s nowhere else to put anything. Though I suppose the flowers could go into the cupboard.

  The Bible takes up a quarter of the table, but I need it because Professor Vysheslavtsev, whose outstanding lectures I attend on Mondays (and I recommend everyone else to do the same), often refers to the Epistles of Paul.

  So I need to consult the Bible.

  Sometimes there are landslides on my table. Everything slips sideways and hangs over the edge. And then it takes only the slightest disturbance of the air (mountaineers will know what I mean); it takes only the opening of a window or the postman knocking at the door—and an entire avalanche roars and crashes to the floor. Sometimes I then discover long-lost items—things I’ve replaced long ago: gloves; a volume of Proust; a theatre ticket from last summer; an unsent letter (and there I was, impatiently waiting for an answer!); a flower from a ball gown… Sometimes this excites a kind of scientific interest in me, as if I were a palaeontologist who has happened upon the bone of a mammoth. To which era should I assign this glove or page of manuscript?

  Worst of all are flowers; if there’s a landslide, they create a flood. If someone gives me flowers, they are always taken aback by my look of sudden anxiety.

  As for domestic animals, I have only a bead snake and a small monster—a varnished cedar cone standing on little paws. It brings me luck.

  While we’re on the theme of domesticity and creature comforts, I did also once have a venetian blind. But there wasn’t room for it in the room; it had to go. If I’d hung on to it, it could have created mayhem.

  I’m not planning to write anything at all big. I think you’ll understand why.

  We must wait for a big table. And if we wait in vain—tant pis.1

  1926

  Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler

  Notes

  1 A common French idiom. Here, the sense is “Well, that’s just too bad.”

  My Pseudonym

  I’m often asked about the origin of my pseudonym: “Teffi”. Why Teffi? It sounds like something you’d call a dog. And a great many readers of the Russian Word have indeed given this name to their fox terriers and Italian greyhounds.

  And why would a Russian woman sign her work with a name that sounds English?

  If I felt I needed a pen name, I could have gone for something with more of a ring to it, or at least a hint of some political ideal, like bitter Maxim Gorky, poor Demyan Bedny or Skitalets the Wanderer. Their names all hint at suffering in the name of some cause and help to win the reader’s sympathy.

  Besides, women writers tend to go for male pseudonyms. A wise and circumspect move. It is common practice to regard ladies with a somewhat ironic smile, and even with incredulity:

  “How on earth did she come up with something like this?”

  “Her husband must be doing the writing for her.”

  Among those women who have used male pseudonyms are the writer known as “Marko Vovchok”, the talented novelist and public figure who signed her work as “Vergezhsky” and the talented poetess who writes her critical essays under the name of “Anton the Extreme”. All this, I repeat, has its raison d’être. It makes sense and it looks good. But “Teffi”? What sort of nonsense is that?

  So I’d like to give an honest account of how this literary name came into being. It was as I was taking my first steps in literature. At the time I had published only two or three poems, to which I’d put my own name, and I had also written a little one-act play. I had no idea at all how I was going to get this play on stage. Everyone around me was saying that it was absolutely impossible—I needed to have theatrical connections and a literary name with clout. Otherwise the play would never be staged—and no one would ever even bother to read it.

  “What theatre director wants to read just any old nonsense when he could be reading Hamlet or The Government Inspector? Let alone something concocted by some female!”

  At this point I began to do some serious thinking. I didn’t want to hide behind a male pseudonym. That would be weak and cowardly. I’d rather use a name that was incomprehensible, neither one thing nor the other.

  But what? It had to be a name that wo
uld bring good luck. Best of all would be the name of some fool—fools are always lucky.

  Finding a fool, of course, was easy enough. I knew a great many of them. But which one should I choose? Obviously it had to be someone very special. Then I remembered a fool who was not only special, but also unfailingly lucky—someone clearly recognized even by fate as the perfect fool.

  His name was Stepan, but at home everyone called him Steffi. After tactfully discarding the first letter (so that the fool would not get too big for his boots), I decided to sign my play “Teffi”. Then I took a deep breath and sent it straight to the Suvorin Theatre. I didn’t say a word to anyone because I was sure my enterprise would fail.

  A month or two went by. I had nearly forgotten about my little play. It had taught me just one thing: that not even fools always bring you good luck.

  But then one day in New Times I read: “The Woman Question, a one-act play by Teffi, has been accepted for production at the Maly Theatre.”

  I felt terror. Then utter despair.

  I could see immediately that my little play was rank nonsense, that it was silly, dull, that you couldn’t hide for long behind a pseudonym, and that the play was bound to be a spectacular flop—one that would shame me for the rest of my life. I didn’t know what to do, and there was no one I could turn to for advice.

  And then I recalled with horror that when I sent the manuscript I had included my name and return address. That wouldn’t be a problem if they thought I had sent the package on behalf of somebody else, but what if they guessed the truth? What then?

  I didn’t have long to think it over. The next day an official letter came in the post, giving me the date of the first night and informing me when rehearsals would start. I was invited to attend.