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

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

Teffi’s account of her unplanned emigration from Russia, published in English as Memories—From Moscow to the Black Sea, is often seen as her masterpiece. Gathered here is a selection of her shorter reminiscences, ranging from her childhood in 1870s Russia to the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s.

After she left Russia in 1919, Teffi’s longing for that lost world led her to turn to the past in much of her writing. As she puts it in her 1927 collection, The Small Town (Gorodok):

Teffi may also have looked to the past because she felt, as her biographer Edythe Haber describes it, “unable to penetrate the inner life of the French”. In a feuilleton in the émigré newspaper Vozrozhdenie, Teffi wrote that she would never be able to “speak, think and act” on behalf of a French person the way she could on behalf of a Russian.

The first section of this collection, “How I Live and Work”, affords us a few glimpses of Teffi’s life as a writer. The pieces in the second section, “Staging Posts” – mostly written in the 1920s – show us something of Teffi’s personal life, from childhood and adolescence through to motherhood, emigration and life in Paris. “Staging Posts” itself, the most clearly fictionalized of these writings, alludes to a real episode that also figures in Memories, the death of her beloved younger sister Lena; and “The White Flower” evokes Teffi’s first years as an émigrée.

Most of the accounts in the final two sections of this volume—“Heady Days: Revolutions and Civil War” and “Artists and Writers Remembered”—come from My Chronicle, Teffi’s final collection, unpublished during her lifetime. In her preface, Teffi wrote that many interesting people had passed through her life and that her intention was to show them “simply as real people”, since few others were likely to portray them this way. “We Are Still Living” and “The Gadarene Swine” were written at the time of the events they describe. The former dates to 1918, before Teffi had left the city she would always call Petersburg, even though after the outbreak of the First World War it had officially been given the more Slavic name of Petrograd, and the latter to the Russian Civil War, when Teffi was “rolling her way down the map,” along with thousands of others, before leaving Russia forever.