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

HOW I LIVE AND WORK

Many people find it surprising that I live somewhere so busy, right opposite Montparnasse station. But it’s what I like. I adore Paris. I like to hear it here beside me—knocking, honking, ringing and breathing. Sometimes, at dawn, a lorry rumbles past beneath my window so loud and so close that it seems to be coming straight through my room, and I draw up my legs in my sleep so they won’t be run over. And then what wakes me an hour or two later is Paris itself—dear, elegant, beautiful Paris. Far better than being woken by some bewhiskered old crone of a concierge, with the eyes of a cockroach.

Many people ask if it’s possible for a small pension to provide one with complete comfort. To which I modestly reply, “Well, I wouldn’t say quite complete.”

Is it this little table you’re looking at? Yes, I know it’s very small, but there’s nothing it doesn’t do. It’s a writing table, a dining table, a dressing table and a sewing table. It’s only three and a half feet across, but on it I have an inkwell, some writing paper, my face powder, some envelopes, my sewing box, a cup of milk, some flowers, a Bible, sweets, manuscripts and some bottles of scent. In layers, like geological strata. The Augean table. Remember how Hercules had to clean the Augean stables? Well, if Augeas’s stables were in such a state, what do you think his writing table would have been like? Probably just like mine. So, how do I write? I put the cup of milk, the Bible and the bottles of scent on the bed, while the sewing box falls of its own accord onto the floor. I need to keep everything essential close at hand—and anyway there’s nowhere else to put anything. Though I suppose the flowers could go into the cupboard.

The Bible takes up a quarter of the table, but I need it because Professor Vysheslavtsev, whose outstanding lectures I attend on Mondays (and I recommend everyone else to do the same), often refers to the Epistles of Paul.

So I need to consult the Bible.

Sometimes there are landslides on my table. Everything slips sideways and hangs over the edge. And then it takes only the slightest disturbance of the air (mountaineers will know what I mean); it takes only the opening of a window or the postman knocking at the door—and an entire avalanche roars and crashes to the floor. Sometimes I then discover long-lost items—things I’ve replaced long ago: gloves; a volume of Proust; a theatre ticket from last summer; an unsent letter (and there I was, impatiently waiting for an answer!); a flower from a ball gown… Sometimes this excites a kind of scientific interest in me, as if I were a palaeontologist who has happened upon the bone of a mammoth. To which era should I assign this glove or page of manuscript?

Worst of all are flowers; if there’s a landslide, they create a flood. If someone gives me flowers, they are always taken aback by my look of sudden anxiety.

As for domestic animals, I have only a bead snake and a small monster—a varnished cedar cone standing on little paws. It brings me luck.

While we’re on the theme of domesticity and creature comforts, I did also once have a venetian blind. But there wasn’t room for it in the room; it had to go. If I’d hung on to it, it could have created mayhem.

I’m not planning to write anything at all big. I think you’ll understand why.

We must wait for a big table. And if we wait in vain—tant pis.[1]

MY PSEUDONYM

I’m often asked about the origin of my pseudonym: “Teffi”. Why Teffi? It sounds like something you’d call a dog. And a great many readers of the Russian Word have indeed given this name to their fox terriers and Italian greyhounds.

And why would a Russian woman sign her work with a name that sounds English?

If I felt I needed a pen name, I could have gone for something with more of a ring to it, or at least a hint of some political ideal, like bitter Maxim Gorky, poor Demyan Bedny or Skitalets the Wanderer. Their names all hint at suffering in the name of some cause and help to win the reader’s sympathy.

Besides, women writers tend to go for male pseudonyms. A wise and circumspect move. It is common practice to regard ladies with a somewhat ironic smile, and even with incredulity:

“How on earth did she come up with something like this?”

“Her husband must be doing the writing for her.”

Among those women who have used male pseudonyms are the writer known as “Marko Vovchok”, the talented novelist and public figure who signed her work as “Vergezhsky” and the talented poetess who writes her critical essays under the name of “Anton the Extreme”. All this, I repeat, has its raison d’être. It makes sense and it looks good. But “Teffi”? What sort of nonsense is that?

So I’d like to give an honest account of how this literary name came into being. It was as I was taking my first steps in literature. At the time I had published only two or three poems, to which I’d put my own name, and I had also written a little one-act play. I had no idea at all how I was going to get this play on stage. Everyone around me was saying that it was absolutely impossible—I needed to have theatrical connections and a literary name with clout. Otherwise the play would never be staged—and no one would ever even bother to read it.

“What theatre director wants to read just any old nonsense when he could be reading Hamlet or The Government Inspector? Let alone something concocted by some female!”

At this point I began to do some serious thinking. I didn’t want to hide behind a male pseudonym. That would be weak and cowardly. I’d rather use a name that was incomprehensible, neither one thing nor the other.

But what? It had to be a name that would bring good luck. Best of all would be the name of some fool—fools are always lucky.

Finding a fool, of course, was easy enough. I knew a great many of them. But which one should I choose? Obviously it had to be someone very special. Then I remembered a fool who was not only special, but also unfailingly lucky—someone clearly recognized even by fate as the perfect fool.

His name was Stepan, but at home everyone called him Steffi. After tactfully discarding the first letter (so that the fool would not get too big for his boots), I decided to sign my play “Teffi”. Then I took a deep breath and sent it straight to the Suvorin Theatre. I didn’t say a word to anyone because I was sure my enterprise would fail.

A month or two went by. I had nearly forgotten about my little play. It had taught me just one thing: that not even fools always bring you good luck.

But then one day in New Times I read: “The Woman Question, a one-act play by Teffi, has been accepted for production at the Maly Theatre.”

I felt terror. Then utter despair.

I could see immediately that my little play was rank nonsense, that it was silly, dull, that you couldn’t hide for long behind a pseudonym, and that the play was bound to be a spectacular flop—one that would shame me for the rest of my life. I didn’t know what to do, and there was no one I could turn to for advice.

And then I recalled with horror that when I sent the manuscript I had included my name and return address. That wouldn’t be a problem if they thought I had sent the package on behalf of somebody else, but what if they guessed the truth? What then?

I didn’t have long to think it over. The next day an official letter came in the post, giving me the date of the first night and informing me when rehearsals would start. I was invited to attend.

Everything was out in the open. My lines of retreat had been cut off. This was rock bottom. Since nothing could be more terrifying, I could now give serious thought to my situation.

Why exactly had I decided the play was so very bad? If it was bad, they wouldn’t have accepted it. That they had accepted it could only be thanks to the good luck of the fool whose name I had taken. If I had signed the play “Kant” or “Spinoza”, they would surely have rejected it.

I needed to pull myself together and go to the rehearsal. Otherwise they might try to track me down through the police.

Along I went. The play was being directed by Yevtikhy Karpov, someone suspicious of any kind of innovation, a man of the old school.

“Box set, three doors, and your lines from memory—rattle them off facing the audience.”

He greeted me with condescension. “So you’re the author, are you? All right. Find yourself a seat and keep quiet.”

Need I say that I did indeed keep quiet? Up on stage a rehearsal was underway. The young actress Grinyova (whom I sometimes still see here in Paris—she has changed so little that when I look at her my heart flutters as it did back then…) was in the lead role. She was holding a crumpled handkerchief that she kept pressing to her mouth—the latest mannerism among young actresses.

“Stop muttering under your breath!” shouted Karpov. “Face the audience! You don’t know your lines! You don’t know your lines!”

“Yes I do!” said Grinyova, offended.

“Oh do you? All right then. Prompter—not another word from you! Let her stew in her own juice—like a sprat in a pan!”

Karpov was a bad psychologist. No one would remember their lines after intimidation like that.

Oh this is dreadful, I thought, really dreadful! Why had I even written this dreadful play? Why had I sent it to the theatre? The actors were suffering—being forced to learn all this claptrap of mine by heart. And now the play was going to fail and the papers would write, “It is a shame that a serious theatre should be wasting its time on such nonsense when people are going hungry.” And then, when I went to my grandmother’s for Sunday breakfast, she would give me a stern look and say, “We’ve been hearing things about you. I very much hope they’re untrue.”

Nevertheless I carried on going to the rehearsals. I was amazed by the friendly way the actors greeted me—I had expected them to hate and despise me. Karpov laughed loudly and said, “The poor author’s wasting away. She’s getting thinner and thinner.”

The “poor author” held her tongue and tried not to weep. And then came the point of no return. The day of the performance. To go or not to go? I decided to go but to find myself a place somewhere at the very back where no one would see me. After all, Karpov was capable of anything. If the play flopped, he might stick his head out from the wings and shout, “Leave this theatre and don’t come back, you fool!”

My little play followed a long and extremely tedious four-act work by some novice. The audience was bored—yawning and whistling its disapproval. Then, after the last jeering whistle and after the interval, up went the curtain and my characters began to prattle away.

“Utterly dreadful!” I was thinking. “What a disgrace!”

But the audience laughed once, laughed again, then began to enjoy themselves. I promptly forgot I was the author and laughed along with everyone else as old Yevgenia Yablochkina played a woman general marching around the stage in uniform and tooting martial fanfares with no instrument but her lips. All in all, the actors were very good. They did my play proud.

“Author!” the audience began calling out. “Author!”

What was I to do?

Up went the curtain. The cast took a bow and made a show of searching for the author.

I leapt from my seat and began to make my way down the aisle towards the wings. Then the curtain came back down, so I returned to my seat. But once again the audience called for the author, and once again the curtain went up, the cast took a bow and someone on stage shouted, “But where’s the author?” Once again I made for the wings, but once again the curtain came back down. And so it went on. I carried on dashing backwards and forwards until someone with a shock of wild hair (I learnt later that this was Alexander Kugel) grabbed me by the arm and bellowed, “For the love of God—she’s right here!”

But at this point the curtain, after going up for the sixth time, came down once and for all. The audience began to disperse.

The following day I had my first ever conversation with a journalist, who had come to my apartment to interview me.

“What are you working on right now?”

“I’m making some shoes for my niece’s doll…”

“Oh really? And what does your pseudonym mean?”

“It’s… the name of a foo… I mean it’s a surname.”

“Someone said it’s from Kipling.”

Saved! I was saved! There is indeed such a name in Kipling. And not only that, but in Trilby there’s a little ditty that goes:

It all came back to me straightaway. Yes, of course, it was from Kipling!

Beneath the photograph of me that appeared in the newspapers was the word “Taffy”.[2]

That was it. There was no going back.

And so it remains.

MY FIRST VISIT TO AN EDITORIAL OFFICE

My first steps as an author were terrifying. I had never, in any case, intended to become a writer, even though everyone in our family had written poetry from childhood on. For some reason this activity seemed horribly shameful, and should any of us find a brother or sister with a pencil, a notebook and an inspired expression, we would immediately shout out, “You’re writing! You’re writing!”

The guilty party would begin to make excuses and the accusers would hop around, jeering, “You’re writing! You’re writing!”

The only one of us above suspicion was our eldest brother, a creature suffused with sombre irony.[1] But one day, when he was back at the lycée after the summer holidays, we found scraps of paper in his room covered in poetic exclamations, and one line repeated over and over again:

“Oh Mirra, Mirra, palest moon!”

Alas! He, too, was writing poetry.

This discovery made quite an impression on us. And who knows, it may even have influenced my older sister Masha’s choice of pen name. When she became famous, she adopted the name “Mirra Lokhvitskaya”.

My own dream was to become an artist. I had even, on the advice of a businesslike friend from kindergarten, written this wish down on a piece of paper, chewed it a little, and thrown it out of the window of a train. My kindergarten friend assured me that this was a “foolproof ” method.

When my older sister began to publish her own poetry after leaving college, I sometimes went with her to the editorial office on the way back from school. My nanny[2] would come too, carrying my satchel of school books.

And while my sister was sitting in the editor’s office (I don’t remember now what journal it was, but I remember that the editors were Pyotr Gnedich and Vsevolod Solovyov),[3] Nanny and I would wait in the outer room.

I would sit a little way away from Nanny, so that nobody would guess that she was accompanying me. I would assume an inspired expression, and imagine how everybody—the delivery boy and the copy-typist and all the would-be contributors—would take me for a writer.

The only thing was, the chairs in the reception were inconveniently high, and my feet didn’t touch the ground. However, the inspired expression on my face more than made up for this handicap—and for my short dress and school pinafore.

By the age of thirteen, I already had some literary works under my belt. I had written some verses on the arrival of the Tsaritsa[4] and on the anniversary of the founding of our school. These latter—hastily composed in the form of a high-flown ode—contained a stanza for which I was later made to suffer a great deal:

My sister tormented me for a whole year over that “great shrine of education”. If I pretended I had a headache and wasn’t going into school, she would immediately start up a chant: “Nadya, Nadya, why aren’t you going to the great shrine of education? How can you bear the light of truth to shine without you?”

And then, when I was sixteen or seventeen, I wrote a comical poem called “The Song of Margarita”, and, without showing it to anyone, of course, I decided to take it along to the journal Oskolki.

The editor of Oskolki was Leikin. At that time he was already very old and in poor health. And he did, in fact, die soon afterwards.

I went to the editorial office. It was terrifying. Particularly when I was on the staircase, about to ring the bell. The door was small and dirty. There was a smell of cabbage pie, something I can’t abide. I rang the bell—and thought, “Quick! Run away!”

But then I heard a scrabbling sound from behind the door. Somebody was taking the chain off the hook. The door opened a crack, and an eye peeped through. Then another eye. Then the door opened the rest of the way.

“Who do you want?”

It was a very thin, elderly lady with an Orenburg shawl worn crosswise over her chest.

“I’ve co-come to-to see Leikin.”

“Sir isn’t here yet,” said the lady. “Come in. Sit down and wait. He will be here presently.”

She ushered me into a tiny room and went away. From there I could see another room, also rather small, with a writing desk and, above it, a stuffed bird.

I waited a long time. Occasionally the lady would come back and, stroking the front of her shawl with her bony hands, would whisper, “Just a little longer. He won’t be long now.”

Then I heard the doorbell. A stamping of feet, a coughing and a wheezing. I could make out the words:

“Who?”

“What?”

“Eh?”

“Why?”

“For me?”

“Damn!”

Then the wheezing stopped, and once again the thin lady came in and said in a nervous whisper, “Sir still needs to warm up.” Then she went out again. I sat and thought how awful it was to lead a literary life.

Once again, the thin lady came in, and, clearly feeling sorry for me and hoping to cheer me up, she whispered, “Sir still hasn’t quite warmed up.”

Such a kind woman! I wanted to put my arms around her neck, so that we could weep in each other’s arms. She went out again. Oh heavens! I so wanted to leave! But I didn’t dare leave now. Here she was again, “All over now. He’s done.”

At first I didn’t realize what she meant. For a moment I thought Leikin had died. I got to my feet, horrified.

“Don’t fret yourself,” said the lady. “Sir will see you now.”

I frowned, then stepped forward. After all, he wasn’t going to kill me. In an armchair, in front of the stuffed bird, sat a thickset, crook-shouldered, apparently cross-eyed man with a black beard. He seemed very gloomy.

“To what do I owe the honour of this visit?” he asked, not looking at me. “What do you want?”

“Poetry,” I mumbled.

“What poetry?”

“‘The Song of Margarita’.”

“Eh? I don’t think we’ve ever had that here. Can you give me a clearer idea of what you mean?”

“I wrote it. Here it is.”

He held out his hand, still not looking at me. I thrust my sheet of paper into it.

“Well?” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“Well—goodbye. You’ll be able to read the answer in our ‘post bag’.”[5]

A month later, I read in the Oskolki “post bag”: “‘The Song of Margarita’ has nothing to recommend it.”

This was my first step as a writer. Later, by way of a secret triumph over that angry (albeit by then deceased) editor, I managed to get it printed no fewer than four times, in a number of publications.

Though, I think, had I been an editor myself, I wouldn’t have printed it even once.