Teffi - beloved Russian writer, sad exile.

My maternal side of the family was very proud of the Russian arts, with one cousin becoming a professional writer, one a composer and two became music teachers. My late mother studied literature at uni­ver­sity then joined a number of book clubs. Her goal was to read every Russian novel and play (in English) from Alexander Pushkin 1799-1837 on. Of the early writers, she loved Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821-81, Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910, Anton Chekhov 1860–1904 and Maxim Gorky 1868-1936. Of the modern writers, no-one quite matched up to Boris Pasternak 1890–1960.

I quite believe that Russians are indeed "the world's most reading nation", even decades after their writers and readers perman­ent­ly moved abroad. So I was very lucky my mother didn’t keep her memories alive by calling me Lyudmila at birth, and my brothers Igor and Grigor. 

Teffi arrived in France in 1920, 

planning to go home to Russia when she could. She never did.

Wiki

Imagine the surprise when a Russian writer’s book called Memories from Moscow to the Black Sea was reviewed by Judith Armstrong in the Weekend Australian (12th-13th Nov 2016). Written by Teffi, the book was published by Pushkin Press in 2016. Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya aka Teffi (1872-1952) was one of Tsar Nicholas II’s favourite writers, a woman born into a well educated professional St Petersburg family. Early in her career she wrote short stories and satirical articles for newspapers and magazines. In the heady excitement and radical passion after the 1905 Revolution, Teffi turned increasingly to political issues and published in the Satiricon magazine and the Russian Word newspaper. Life was going very well indeed.

Even then there was a price to pay. Teffi left her noble husband and three children on their country estate and returned to St Petersburg alone.

But when Lenin returned to Russia in 1917, he apparently had no feel­ing for beauty whatsoever. He overhauled New Life magazine, saying “Nowadays we don’t need theatre. Nor do we need music. We don’t need any articles about art or culture of any sort.” Like every Russian whose soul was fed by Russian culture, Teffi was devastated. She resigned with the rest of the literary section, not long before the paper was shut down by the authorities.

In 1918 Teffi moved to Moscow, Kiev and then Odessa, but she was never going to find a happy place to settle. The miseries brought by WW1 and the difficulties of the Russian Revolution suggested to her that the time had come to look for a new life. Her book was “her blackly funny and heart­breaking account of her final, frantic journey into exile across Russia - travelling by cart, freight train and rickety steamer - and the ordinary and unheroic people she met. From refugees setting up camp on a dockside to a singer desperately buying a few last scraps of fabric to make a dress, all were caught up in the whirlwind; all were immortalised by Teffi's penetrating gaze. Her sadness at leaving home and her horror of never seeing the family again will resonate with every person across the planet who has EVER gone into exile.

How does one describe the state of being a no-one nowhere, with no place on the map, or in society, to claim as one’s own? Teffi did not pretend to know what she did not know at the time. The brief stories of her journey through Russia contained almost no generalis­at­ions. On only a couple of occasions did the writer insert a fact that she learned some months after the events she was describing. She succeeded in conveying the sense of claustrophobia and disorientation that typified the refugee condition. [I lived overseas for 5 years and although I spoke the language fluently and was not a refugee, there was always the fear of stuffing up, of accidentally offending, of not finding my way around].

Readers believed that a trademark of Teffi’s writing had always been her ability to describe the absurd as though it were the ordinary. In the second half of this book, follow a harrowing train journey through Russia and Ukraine (with stays in German-occupied Kiev and French-occupied Odessa, which she fled as the Reds approach). Teffi ended up aboard a ship to Istanbul, commandeered by an ad hoc group of refug­ees. She ­had to scrub the decks on the ship to prove that she too was a proper worker.

 

Memories was first published as a serial, Dec 1928-Jan 1930.
It was republished in Russia by Pushkin Press in 2016

The book ended mid-journey, in the uncertainty that was the hallmark of the refugee state. The author was saying her goodbye to Russia, but she could not know where she was going next, when or how. I agreed with the comparison that was drawn with the works of Stefan Zweig, the Austrian author who wrote about the end of a grand epoch of European civilisation just before WW2. But everyone’s sadness is personal; everyone’s tragedy is individual. Perhaps it is just as well I did not even recognise Nadezhda Lokh­vits­kaya aka Teffi’s name before Judith Armstrong’s review. Teffi’s experiences would have broken my heart.

It worked out well in the end. After years of wanderings, Teffi settled in Paris in 1920, where she lived and wrote succ­ess­fully. Like so many other Russian intell­ectuals, Teffi began publishing her works in the Russian newspapers in Paris and had an eager and large Russian-reading public. Her book Memories from Moscow to the Black Sea was first published as a serial between Dec 1928 and Jan 1930.

The final years in Paris were financially strapped but friends looked after her until her death in 1952. Appropriately Teffi was buried in the Russian Orthodox cemetery called Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, just south of Paris.

Not until the late 1980s was Teffi’s work seriously reconsidered in Russia. In 1990, an important publisher in Moscow brought out a two-volume edition of her humorous stories and in 1997, the Gorky Institute of World Literature held a Teffi conference to honour her oeuvre.

In recent years Pushkin Press has done English readers a service by releasing Rasputin and Other Ironies (2010), a selection of Teffi’s old journalism and non-fiction: politics, society, art, literature and family life. And Subtly Worded (2014), a collection of her short stor­ies. The publications are in elegant packaging and have scholarly notes attached.

Teffi: A Life of Letters and of Laughter

by Edythe Haber, 2018

Her most popular works: A Modest Talent; Diamond Dust; All about Love; Love and a Family Journey; When the Crayfish Whistled; Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others and Me; and Memories. For short stories, see Shoshi's Book Blog.