Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

FURTHER READING

Ivan Bunin, Cursed Days: Diary of a Revolution, tr. Thomas Gaitan Marullo (Ivan Dee, 1998)

Viktor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey, tr. Richard Sheldon (Dalkey Archive Press, 2004)

Edith Sollohub, The Russian Countess (Impress Books, 2011)

Marina Tsvetaeva, Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922, tr. Jamey Gambrell (Yale University Press, 2011)

Edith Sollohub, unlike Bunin, Shklovsky, and Tsvetaeva, was never a professional writer. Hers, though, is the most interesting of these memoirs. Like Teffi, she writes vividly and with understanding about all the many people, from all classes, whom she encountered during her last years in Russia. At times her narrative attains a real spiritual depth.

Subtly Worded (Pushkin Press, 2014)

Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi (New York Review Books, 2016)

Stories by Teffi are included both in Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics, 2005) and in Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics, 2012)

Elizabeth Neatrour’s translation of Teffi’s play The Woman Question (first performed in 1907) is included in Catriona Kelly (ed.), Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing 1777–1992 (Oxford University Press, 1994).

There is not yet any complete edition of Teffi’s work. The most useful collected editions are the five-volume Sobranie sochinenii published by Terra in 2008 and the seven-volume Sobranie sochinenii published by Lakom in 1997–2000; the latter also includes useful notes. There are numerous single-volume selections, mostly oddly similar in their choice of texts. Some of Teffi’s finest volumes have yet to be republished; as far as I know, none of the stories in her outstanding Vechernii Den’ (Prague, 1924) have been reprinted at all.

The volumes on which we have drawn for Memories are:

1. Moya letopis’ (Moscow: Vagrius, 2004)

This contains the complete text of Vospominaniya as well as the articles about writers and other important figures that Teffi hoped, toward the end of her life, to publish as a separate volume titled Moya letopis’ (My Chronicle).

2. Teffi v strane vospominanii (Kiev: LP Media, 2011)

An excellent compilation of articles and sketches written by Teffi between 1917 and 1919. Many were published in journals and newspapers in Kiev and Odessa during Teffi’s last months in Russia, the period Teffi describes in Memories. Most of these pieces are also included in a smaller but more easily obtainable volume: Kontrrevolyutsionnaya bukva (Azbuka, 2006).