Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

MEMORIES was first published, in installments, between December 1928 and January 1930, in Paris, in the Russian-language newspaper Vozrozhdenie. Its first readers were Russian émigrés. Nearly all were from the same cultural world as Teffi and many had been through similar experiences during their last months in Russia. I have provided endnotes, to the best of my ability, to fill in the cultural and political references that Teffi could take for granted in her original readership. What I have not done is to fill in the strictly personal details that Teffi has left vague or purposely obscured. Teffi was uncommonly reticent about her personal life, and I have chosen to respect this. But I wholeheartedly encourage anyone wanting to know more to turn to Edythe Haber’s forthcoming biography.

Teffi is now widely read in Russia—new editions of her best-known stories come out almost yearly—but she still receives little scholarly attention. Probably because of her lack of pretense, she remains underestimated. In 1931, in a review of a new collection of Teffi’s short stories, the Russian émigré poet Georgy Adamovich wrote, “There are writers who muddy their own water, to make it seem deeper. Teffi could not be more different: the water is entirely transparent, yet the bottom is barely visible.” These words are still more apt with regard to Memories, an elegant and carefully composed work of art that appears, on first reading, to have been thrown together casually and spontaneously.

In essence, Memories is a series of goodbyes: to Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Russia itself; to friends—some who died and some who stayed in Soviet Russia; to the Russian theater; and to Russia’s two most important religious centers. Each of these goodbyes is in its distinct emotional register. Teffi’s departure from Moscow is solemn; her departure from Odessa is farcical; her final departure on the boat to Constantinople is deeply sad. Teffi avoids repetition, but she makes skilful use of echoes and symmetries. Most poignant of all, perhaps, is the contrast between her account of her last public reading in Soviet Russia—in a “Club of Enlightenment” packed with Red Army soldiers and Cheka officers draped in bullet belts—and her account near the end of the memoir of an evening in a Yekaterinodar theater where the glittering audience includes the commander-in-chief of the White Army. The former ends with a few well-wishers in the audience—women who appear “infinitely weary” and “hopelessly sad”—calling out to Teffi “Sweetheart! We love you! God grant you get out of here soon!” The evening in Yekaterinodar ends with Teffi joining in excited calls for the author to go out onstage, momentarily forgetting that she is herself the author of the plays just performed. The nature of authorship—the extent to which anyone is in control of their own life and the extent to which an artist does, or does not, have authority over their own creations—is another of Teffi’s leitmotifs in Memories.

The final chapter is astonishing; shortly before leaving Russia, Teffi imagines saying goodbye to life itself. Standing at dawn beneath the hilltop gallows where an anarchist known as “Ksenya G” was hanged by the Whites, she imagines Ksenya’s last minutes. Ksenya was “bold, gay, young, and beautiful.” She was “always chic”; she was independent-minded. She has much in common with Teffi herself, and Teffi knows this. This scene may, amongst other things, serve as a source of bleak comfort, a reminder to Teffi that there are still worse fates than losing one’s country. Had Teffi chosen to stay, she too might well have been executed.

Like many of the greatest Russian prose writers of the last century—Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrey Platonov, and Varlam Shalamov, among others—Teffi began her literary career as a poet. Like these other writers—with the possible exception of Shalamov—she is more truly a poet in her prose than in her verse. She writes precisely, colloquially and with delicate modulations of tone. There are subtle echoes and symmetries not only in the book’s overall structure, but also at the level of individual chapters, paragraphs, and even sentences. Irony, tragedy, absurdity, and high spirits interweave, sometimes undercutting one another, sometimes reinforcing one another. Behind every sentence the reader can sense a living voice; the intonation of every phrase can be clearly heard.

All this makes Teffi’s prose difficult to translate. It also makes it ideal material for practicing the art of translation—my thanks to the several hundred students of all ages who have tried their hand at translating passages from Memories in courses and workshops during the last five years at the London Review Bookshop, Pushkin House (Bloomsbury), Queen Mary University of London, and the annual literary translation summer school founded by Ros Schwartz and Naomi Segal and now known as “Translate in the City.” Many of these students have contributed phrases to the present translation.

Thanks also to the following for their help and suggestions: Alexandra Babushkina, Lois Bentall, Marina Boroditskaya, Ismene Brown, Roger Clarke, Mahaut de Cordon-Prache, Richard Davies, Natalya Duzhina, Darra Goldstein, Colin and Lis Howlett, Alina Israeli, Nathan Jeffers, Sara Jolly, Yelena Karl, Clare Kitson, Sophie Lockey, Elena Malysheva, Irina Mashinski, Melanie Moore, Natasha Perova, Caroline Rees, Peter Scotto, Richard Shaw, Dmitry Shlyonsky, Stanislav Tsalik, and Christine Worobec.

I am especially grateful to Anne Marie Jackson and to Irina Steinberg, but for whose passionate enthusiasm for Teffi this project would not have got off the ground. And also to Edythe Haber, for generously sharing her encyclopedic knowledge of Teffi’s life and work; to Michele Berdy, Masha Bloshteyn, Boris Dralyuk, Rose France, and Elena Trubilova for help with translation problems; and to my wife, whose ear for language grows more sensitive with each year.

Thanks also to The New Yorker for publishing extracts from Memories on their website: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/stepping-across-ice-teffi-1872-1952