Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi

INTRODUCTION 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.