Teffi

[Private Collection/Alamy. Teffi on a trip through the South of France, 1929]

Teffi, otherwise Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, was very successful Russian writer, mainly of short stories but also of plays, who lived from 1972 to 1952. She died in France, where she had lived since fleeing the Russian Revolution in 1920 or so. From the golden age of popular fiction, when successful writers had the status and life style that successful musicians and actors have now. Think of the earlier Leo Tolstoy and the later Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon. 

She came to my notice through an article (reference 3) in the NYRB, from the beginning of which we get: ‘Teffi was so adored in pre-revolutionary Russia that a chocolate candy was named after her, with her pretty face on its brightly coloured wrapper. She was a well-regarded poet and a successful dramatist, but it was the feuilletons and funny stories that Teffi wrote for newspapers and magazines that made her a star. In 1910 a Teffi perfume was released to celebrate the publication in St. Petersburg of her first collection, Humorous Stories. Both Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin were devotees of her comic prose…’.

She came to me in the form of two nicely produced paperbacks from the Pushkin Press, references 1 and 2. About 30 stories in 250 pages of text in the first, 300 pages of memories in the second. Suitably wrapped with introductions, end notes and so forth. With the stories mostly having a supernatural flavour and the memories covering her escape, along with lots of other luvvies, from Moscow to Istanbul.

Enough for Teffi to come across as a very talented writer, but oddly disappointing at the same time. A lifelong atheist, I found all the supernatural a little irritating, even as a garnish, rather than the main business. Even allowing for a lot of the Russians - including her - of the beginning of the 20th century being a god fearing, pious and superstitious lot. Much kissing of small icons. While the memories tell of the well trodden path of the Russian emigration of the early 1920s. I associated to Dr. Zhivago, where Pasternak covered some of the same ground, for which see reference 5. That said, Teffi has a splendidly light touch. On her telling anyway, she put up with the mess, the deprivations and the dangers with great spirit.

Both books were largely set in the borderlands in and around what is now the Ukraine. Fairly much from the point of view of the educated middle class milieu from which Teffi came. Not much about the workers.

Interestingly, the translation, which I find – without knowing any Russian – entirely satisfactory, is a team effort. And the lead translators of the first volume were, it seems, supported by a panel. And their use of northern dialect in the first volume for the peasants works very well.

I wonder this morning why she has not been translated as much as Simenon, with her evoking the Russia and Russians of her time as successfully as he evokes the Paris and Parisians of his. Not to mention Belgians. Is that Russia is so different? Is that Simenon was the better publicist? Or that she writes in the short story, rather than short novel format? Does the public at large share my prejudice against short stories? In my case despite occasional forays into the short stories of both Lawrence (DH) and Chekhov.

I dare say I shall try some more Teffi in due course. Maybe read these two books again. Or maybe I will jump across to her biography at reference 6.

PS: I might add that it has taken about a year to get this far. For such a talented writer, whatever took me so long?

References

Reference 1: Other worlds – Teffi – 2021. A new translation from the Pushkin Press. A collection of short stories, originally published 1916-1952.

Reference 2: Memories from Moscow to the Black Sea – Teffi – 1928/1930, 2016.

Reference 3: Russian Metamorphoses: Teffi’s supernatural tales ask what we can understand about the nature of events, and about the transformative moments that thread events together into stories - Rachel Polonsky/NYRB - 2021. May 27, 2021 issue.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teffi. 

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=zhivago. 

Reference 6: Teffi: A Life of Letters and Laughter – Haber, Edythe – 2018.