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

MY FIRST TOLSTOY

I remember… I’m nine years old.

I’m reading Childhood by Tolstoy. Over and over again.

Everything in this book is dear to me.

Volodya, Nikolenka and Lyubochka are all living with me; they’re all just like me and my brothers and sisters. And their home in Moscow with their grandmother is our Moscow home; when I read about their drawing room, morning room or classroom, I don’t have to imagine anything—these are all our own rooms.

I know Natalya Savishna, too. She’s our old Avdotya Matveyevna, Grandmother’s former serf. She too has a trunk with pictures glued to the top. Only she’s not as good-natured as Natalya Savishna. She likes to grumble. “Nor was there anything in nature he ever wished to praise.” So my older brother used to sum her up, quoting from Pushkin’s “The Demon”.

Nevertheless, the resemblance is so pronounced that every time I read about Natalya Savishna, I picture Avdotya Matveyevna.

Every one of these people is near and dear to me.

Even the grandmother—peering with stern, questioning eyes from under the ruching of her cap, a bottle of eau de cologne on the little table beside her chair—even the grandmother is near and dear to me.

The only alien element is the tutor, Saint-Jérôme, whom Nikolenka and I both hate. Oh, how I hate him! I hate him even more and longer than Nikolenka himself, it seems, because Nikolenka eventually buries the hatchet, but I go on hating him for the rest of my life.

Childhood became part of my own childhood and girlhood, merging with it seamlessly, as though I wasn’t just reading but truly living it.

But what pierced my heart in its first flowering, what pierced it like a red arrow was another work by Tolstoy—War and Peace.

I remember…

I’m thirteen years old.

Every evening, at the expense of my homework, I’m reading one and the same book over and over again—War and Peace.

I’m in love with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. I hate Natasha, first because I’m jealous, second because she betrayed him.

“You know what?” I tell my sister. “I think Tolstoy got it wrong when he was writing about her. How could anyone possibly like her? How could they? Her braid was ‘thin and short’, her lips were puffy. No, I don’t think anyone could have liked her. And if Prince Andrei was going to marry her, it was because he felt sorry for her.”

It also bothered me that Prince Andrei always shrieked when he was angry. I thought Tolstoy had got it wrong here, too. I felt certain the Prince didn’t shriek.

And so every evening I was reading War and Peace.

The pages leading up to the death of Prince Andrei were torture to me.

I think I always nursed a little hope of some miracle. I must have done, because each time he lay dying I felt overcome by the same despair.

Lying in bed at night, I would try to save him. I would make him throw himself to the ground along with everyone else when the grenade was about to explode. Why couldn’t just one soldier think to push him out of harm’s way? That’s what I’d have done. I’d have pushed him out of the way all right.

Then I would have sent him the very best doctors and surgeons of the time.

Every week I would read that he was dying, and I would hope and pray for a miracle. I would hope and pray that maybe this time he wouldn’t die.

But he did. He died. And died again.

A living person dies once, but Prince Andrei was dying forever, forever.

My heart ached. I couldn’t do my homework. And in the morning… Well, you know what it’s like in the morning when you haven’t done your homework!

Finally, I hit upon an idea. I decided to go and see Tolstoy and ask him to save Prince Andrei. I would even allow him to marry the Prince to Natasha. Yes, I was even prepared to agree to that—anything to save him from dying!

I asked my governess whether a writer could change something in a work he had already published. She said she thought he probably could—sometimes writers make amendments in later editions.

I conferred with my sister. She said that when you called on a writer you had to bring a small photograph of him and ask him to autograph it, or else he wouldn’t even talk to you. Then she said that writers didn’t talk to juveniles anyway.

It was very intimidating.

Gradually I worked out where Tolstoy lived. People were telling me different things—one person said he lived in Khamovniki, another said he’d left Moscow, and someone else said he would be leaving any day now.

I bought the photograph and started to think about what to say. I was afraid I might just start crying. I didn’t let anyone in the house know about my plans—they would have laughed at me.

Finally, I took the plunge. Some relatives had come for a visit and the household was a flurry of activity—it seemed a good moment. I asked my elderly nanny to walk me “to a friend’s house to do some homework” and we set off.

Tolstoy was at home. The few minutes I spent waiting in his foyer were too short to orchestrate a getaway. And with my nanny there it would have been awkward.

I remember a stout lady humming as she walked by. I certainly wasn’t expecting that. She walked by entirely naturally. She wasn’t afraid, and she was even humming. I had thought everyone in Tolstoy’s house would walk on tiptoe and speak in whispers.

Finally he appeared. He was shorter than I’d expected. He looked at Nanny, then at me. I held out the photograph and, too scared to be able to pronounce my “R”s, I mumbled, “Would you pwease sign your photogwaph?”

He took it out of my hand and went into the next room.

At this point I understood that I couldn’t possibly ask him for anything and that I’d never dare say why I’d come. With my “pwease” and “photogwaph” I had brought shame on myself. Never, in his eyes, would I be able to redeem myself. Only by the grace of God would I get out of here in one piece.

He came back and gave me the photograph. I curtsied.

“What can I do for you, madam?” he asked Nanny.

“Nothing, sir, I’m here with the young lady, that’s all.”

Later on, lying in bed, I remembered my “pwease” and “photogwaph” and cried into my pillow.

At school I had a rival named Yulenka Arsheva. She, too, was in love with Prince Andrei, but so passionately that the whole class knew about it. She, too, was angry with Natasha Rostova and she, too, could not believe that the Prince shrieked.

I was taking great care to hide my own feelings. Whenever Yulenka grew agitated, I tried to keep my distance and not listen to her so that I wouldn’t betray myself.

And then, one day, during literature class, our teacher was analysing various literary characters. When he came to Prince Bolkonsky, the class turned as one to Yulenka. There she sat, red-faced, a strained smile on her lips and her ears so suffused with blood that they even looked swollen.

Their names were now linked. Their romance evoked mockery, curiosity, censure, intense personal involvement—the whole gamut of attitudes with which society always responds to any romance.

I alone did not smile—I alone, with my secret, “illicit” feeling, did not acknowledge Yulenka or even dare look at her.

In the evening I sat down to read about his death. But now I read without hope. I was no longer praying for a miracle.

I read with feelings of grief and suffering, but without protest. I lowered my head in submission, kissed the book and closed it.

There once was a life. It was lived out, and it ended.

THE MEREZHKOVSKYS

People who knew Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius well do not write very warmly of them in their memoirs.

Andrei Bely writes that Merezhkovsky wore shoes with pompoms, and that these pompoms epitomized the whole of Merezhkovsky’s life. Both his speech and his thought had “pompoms”.[1]

Not the most precise of descriptions, but certainly not a very kind one. Though Andrei Bely was not without “pompoms” of his own.

Alexei Remizov calls Merezhkovsky a walking coffin, and says that “Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius was all bones and springs—a complex mechanical apparatus—but it was impossible to think of her as a living human being. With stinging malice they rejected every manifestation of life.”

The complex mechanical apparatus called Zinaida Gippius was in fact a great deal more complex than “bones and springs”.

I’ve more than once had occasion to read extremely spiteful literary reminiscences about “friends”. Something along the lines of an earthly Last Judgment. A man is stripped of all his coverings and ornaments and his naked corpse is dragged out into the open to be ridiculed.

This is cruel and wrong. We must not forget how difficult it is to be a human being.

After reading memoirs like this, one writer recently said, “You know, for the first time in my life, I’ve felt terrified by the thought of dying.”

And I was reminded of a sweet lady from Petersburg who said of a friend, “There’s nothing this woman won’t stoop to if she thinks she’ll gain by it. You can take my word for it—I’m her best friend.”

Trying to describe Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius really is very difficult.

Each was one of a kind, completely out of the ordinary—the usual yardsticks did not apply to them. Their literary gifts aside—considered simply as people—each could have been the central character in a long psychological novel.

Their extraordinary, almost tragic egocentricity was understandable once one had found the key to it. This key was their utter detachment from everyone else, a detachment that seemed innate and which they had no compunctions about. Like Gogol’s Khoma Brut, who had drawn a circle around himself.[2] Neither howling demons nor the flying coffin of a dead sorceress could touch him. He felt cold and he was alone, although there was nothing but a circle separating him—and separating the Merezhkovskys—from people and life. When the Merezhkovskys felt frightened, they briskly sought the help of holy intercessors. They decorated their statuette of Saint Theresa with flowers and, with neither faith nor divine inspiration, mumbled their way through their invocations. On Dmitry Sergeyevich’s death, Zinaida Nikolaevna felt so upset with Saint Theresa for allowing this bad thing to happen that she threw a shawl over the statuette and stood it in the corner. Just like a savage who smears his deity with fat when things go well, and flogs it in the event of misfortune. That is just the way she was. And—at the same time—Zinaida Gippius was an intelligent, subtle and talented poet. An extraordinary combination. She was indeed one of a kind.

When he was told that war had been declared, Dmitry Sergeyevich observed perfectly coolly, “Ah well—but I think the trains will keep running.”

The trains would keep running—and he would be able to take himself off somewhere far, far away, so that the circle he had drawn would not be broken, so that he, Merezhkovsky, would not feel the touch of hard, wicked life; and as for what lay out there, beyond the magic circle—cold, hunger, violence and death—that would be other people’s concern, it wouldn’t touch him.

The Merezhkovskys led strange lives and were so out of touch with reality that it was positively startling to hear them come out with ordinary words like “coal”, “boiled water” and “macaroni”. The word “ink” was less startling—at least it had to do with writing and ideas… They both lived in the world of ideas, and they were unable to see or in any way understand either people or life itself. You won’t find a single real person in any of their writings. Zinaida Gippius freely acknowledged this, saying that the actors in her stories were not people but ideas.

Since I don’t intend to discuss their literary work but simply to describe the Merezhkovskys as they appeared to me, this peculiarity of theirs might seem irrelevant—but it did in fact play a crucial role in their whole approach to people and life.

All around them were scarcely perceptible shades, phantoms and spectres. These shades had names and they spoke, though what they said had no meaning. As for Merezhkovsky, he never conversed. Dialogue meant nothing to him. The Merezhkovskys never knew what any particular person felt about them, nor did they have the least wish to know. They could be attentive (Merezhkovsky could even be absurdly flattering) to someone useful, but without taking any real interest in this person or why they might want to make themselves useful to him.

As to whether they had ever felt simple human love towards someone… I doubt it.

At one time they were very good friends with Dmitry Filosofov. For a long time they formed an inseparable trio.

When a rumour went round Biarritz that Filosofov had died, I thought, “Someone is going to have to tell the Merezhkovskys.”

That day I happened to meet them on the street.

“Have you heard the sad news about Filosofov?”

“What news? Has he died?” asked Merezhkovsky.

“Yes.”

“Do they know what from?” he asked. And without waiting for an answer, he said, “Well, we must be on our way, Zina, or we’ll be late again and all the best dishes will be gone.”

“We’re having lunch at a restaurant today,” he explained.

And that was that.

In Petersburg I had only seldom come across the Merezhkovskys. We didn’t get to know one another at all well until our time in Biarritz.[3] There we saw a lot of one another and talked a great deal.

Life did not go well for the Merezhkovskys in Biarritz. It was not easy for any of us, but it must have been especially hard for them, since they took any kind of disorder in their living arrangements as a personal affront.

We refugees had been allocated the magnificent Maison Basque hotel. Each of us had a beautifully appointed room and bathroom for ten francs a day. But the Merezhkovskys were reluctant to pay even this. They considered it unjust. All their practical affairs were seen to by their secretary, Vladimir Zlobin, a touchingly steadfast friend. A talented poet himself, Zlobin had abandoned literature in order to fully devote himself to looking after the Merezhkovskys.

Money, of course, was tight, and we had to be inventive. A grand fundraising celebration was arranged for Dmitry Sergeyevich’s seventy-fifth birthday.[4]

Presided over by Countess G., the guests—some wearing German uniforms—assembled on the enormous terrace of our hotel. Merezhkovsky gave a long speech that greatly alarmed all the Russians living in the hotel. In this speech he attacked both the Bolsheviks and the Germans. He trusted that the present nightmare would soon be over, that the antichrists terrorizing Russia and the antichrists that now had France by the throat would soon be destroyed, and that the Russia of Dostoevsky would hold out a hand to the France of Pascal and Joan of Arc.

“Now the Germans will throw us out of the hotel,” the Russians whispered fearfully.

But the Germans seemed not to understand Merezhkovsky’s prophecies and they applauded genially along with everyone else. They did not throw us out of the hotel. Nevertheless, we were unable to stay there long. The hotel was to be made into an army barracks and we all had to find rooms in private apartments.

The Merezhkovskys managed to install themselves in a wonderful villa, which naturally they could not afford. Dmitry Sergeyevich was ill; it was thought he had a stomach ulcer. And Zinaida Nikolaevna was nursing him dutifully.

“I changed his hot water bottle seventeen times last night,” she said. “Then old age got the better of me and I emptied out the eighteenth onto my stomach.”

Despite his illness, they continued to receive people on Sundays. Chatting and joking, everyone would sit in the large dining room, around an empty table. Merezhkovsky was usually at the far end of the room, reclining on a chaise longue, sullen and sulking. He would greet his guests by shouting loudly, “There’s no tea. No tea at all.”

“Look, Madam D. has brought us some biscuits,” said Zinaida Nikolaevna.

“Let them bring biscuits. Let them bring everything!” Merezhkovsky declared grimly.

“But Dmitry Sergeyevich,” I said. “I thought suffering ennobled the soul.” I had heard these words from him many times.

“Indeed it does!” he barked—and turned away. I think he found me almost unbearable. When he spoke to me he never looked at me, and when, in my presence, he spoke about me, he would refer to me simply as she. It was quite amusing, really.

After I had packed everything in preparation for the move, I went down to the Merezhkovskys and asked Zinaida Nikolaevna if she could lend me a book for the night. They always had piles of cheap French crime novels which they read diligently every evening.

“Zina,” said Merezhkovsky, “grab one from the second-rate pile and say she absolutely must return it tomorrow morning.”

“No,” I said to Zinaida Nikolaevna. “She is going to choose something she likes and bring it back in her own good time. She is certainly not going to hurry.”

He turned away angrily.

Zinaida Nikolaevna courteously found me one of the more interesting books.

Another time, while we were still at the hotel, I found a letter under my door. The Merezhkovskys and I were being invited to move to the Free Zone. Well-wishers had arranged visas for us and would pay our passage to America. I was to inform the Merezhkovskys at once. And so, off I went.

Merezhkovsky was furious.

“She must tell them to keep their distance. And she’s not to go either.”

“Why should she be so rude to people who are only showing their concern and doing their best to help?” I asked.

“They’re not trying to help us at all, and they’re not in the least concerned about us. They only want our names. I’d rather go to Spain. They’ve got a saint there that hardly anyone has written anything about. I’ll write a book about her and they’ll give me a visa. But she should stay here in Biarritz.”

“More saints?” I asked. “You’re a real demon, Dmitry Sergeyevich—you can’t keep away from saints.”

Strangely, though, despite his loathing for her (a loathing well earned, as I could never resist teasing him), they had somehow taken it into their heads that they’d like to move into an apartment with me. This plan greatly amused the rest of the Russian colony. Everyone was wondering exactly how this arrangement would work out.

During these first months the Merezhkovskys felt a real disgust for the Germans, which they made no attempt to hide. If we were about to go out together, Zinaida Nikolaevna would begin with a quick check: were there any Germans about? If she did see a German, she would slam the gate and wait for him to pass by. And she drew caricatures of the Germans that were really not bad at all.

The Merezhkovskys led a very ordered existence. Dmitry Sergeyevich worked throughout the morning and rested after an early lunch. Then they would always go for a walk.

“A walk is the light of day; a day with no walk—pitch darkness,” he liked to say.

His spine was completely bent. My impression was that he found even standing difficult unless he had something to lean on or a wall to rest against. And so Zinaida Nikolaevna always had to lead him determinedly along, supporting nearly all his weight on her arm. This was something she was so accustomed to that when she and I went out together, she always asked me to take her arm and give her more of my weight.

Very gradually the Merezhkovskys began to allow the Germans into their lives. There were young Germans, students, who wanted to pay their respects to a writer whose work they had read in translation. They would ask in reverent tones for his autograph. Merezhkovsky would never engage in conversation with them. Occasionally, however, he would shout in Russian: “Tell them to bring some cigarettes with them!” or “Tell them we need eggs!” Zinaida Nikolaevna would talk to them now and again, though she never said anything very nice to them.

“You’re all like machines. The bosses command—and you obey.”

“But of course we do, we’re soldiers. We have our discipline. What do you expect us to do?”

“Nevertheless, you’re machines.”

I would needle her.

“I suppose you’d like them to form a Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies? Under a banner with the slogan ‘To Hell with all Officers!’”

“Nevertheless, they’re machines.”

She was not easily diverted.

The Germans’ conduct in Biarritz was not exactly exemplary. Towards those who fawned over them, they were extremely polite and obliging. The rest of us they simply ignored, as if we were transparent. They would look through us and see a house, a crowd, a landscape. It feels strange to be so very transparent.

There was one especially important German. He wore a military uniform, but it seemed that before the war he had been a banker. I can no longer remember his exact political or military position, but, judging by the number of people eager to ingratiate themselves with him, it must have been something important. He had only to walk into a café and Biarritz’s lady aristocrats—the Duchesse de, the Contesse de and even some ladies with more than one de—would spring to their feet and rush towards him. Their faces were ecstatic and adoring; there were tears in their eyes. I should mention that this German official, a man of mature years, was remarkably ugly. Created along the lines of Gogol’s Sobakyevich[5]—whom nature had not given much thought to but had simply hewed out with an axe and decided to leave it at that—this gallant appeared to have been carved, or rather hacked, from tough, resistant wood, and carelessly into the bargain: one nostril was higher, the other lower, one eye was round, the other long. Nor did his appearance seem to matter very much to him. But it was obvious that the inordinate admiration of the Biarritz ladies was starting to go to his head. The old Countess G., the organizer of Merezhkovsky’s birthday celebration, said that she had been truly stunned by this German’s remarkable looks. “Like the knight in the engraving by Dürer!” she had kept exclaiming.

The ladies corrupted the poor German to such a degree that he began acting precious and coy. He was once seen playing with a little dog on the town square, offering it a lump of sugar. He would smile and bend down, then pull his hand away to tease the dog. He was like a spoilt, capricious ballet-dancer whose impresario is infatuated with him.

At some point during the winter his wife appeared. She had heard that a French countess, a lady who moved in the highest society, was rather taken with her husband.

“Is it true she’s no longer young?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” replied the German. “She must be over sixty.”

“Very true,” said a Frenchman who was also party to this conversation. “She certainly is over sixty. She’s eighty-seven.”

This positively frightened the German. He blinked several times and asked for this number to be translated for him. The number was duly translated. After many shakes of the head, he said, “This could only happen in France.”

The countess certainly knew how to bewilder. She would flash her dark eyes, wag a warning finger, or impatiently tap her little foot. This little foot, with its flat sole and its gnarled and hooked elderly toes, resembled nothing so much as a rake, but the countess decked it out in the most youthful manner. She felt she was young and enchanting. If she heard someone speak admiringly of a young woman from her circle, she would feel deeply upset. Her lady companion all but wept: “All night long she kept waking me up and shouting, ‘How could he find her beautiful in my presence. In my presence?’”

I asked Zinaida Nikolaevna, “What do you think? Is she a witch?”

“Of course she’s a witch.”

“Do you think she flies out through the chimney at night?”

“Of course she does.”

“On a broomstick?”

“How else?”

Among the other astonishing characters flitting around Biarritz there was a very amusing Belgian woman who had something to do with the Red Cross. That at least is what she told us—and perched on her mighty bosom, on the stained grey wool into which it had been squeezed, was some kind of badge. This lady drank immoderately and wrote love letters to the elderly countess, imploring her for material assistance. The letters began with the words: “Votre Beauté!”

The countess did not deny the woman the help she asked for, but to her friends she said, “I must admit I am quite afraid to be left alone with her. She gives me such passionate looks.”

This remarkable countess had also taken Dmitry Sergeyevich under her wing—though she took no interest in Zinaida Nikolaevna, whom she merely tolerated as a writer’s wife. As a rule, she disliked women. Women were rivals: well-bred gentlemen are unfailingly courteous to women, and the countess wished to reign supreme. She introduced the Merezhkovskys to the German who resembled the engraving by Dürer, organized breakfast parties and made plans for all kinds of unusual lectures, talks and outings. It was around this time that the Nazi–Soviet pact broke down. Merezhkovsky then boldly affirmed what was to become his motto: “If the Devil is against the Bolsheviks, you should ally yourself with the Devil.” The Germans, of course, were the Devil.

The countess’s plans were indeed brilliant, but money was still very tight.

I remember once going to a café. Seated at a small table by the window were the Merezhkovskys. Not noticing me, they carried on with their conversation. Zinaida Nikolaevna had very poor hearing and Merezhkovsky’s voice filled the room: “They’ve cut off our electricity. Vladimir has been all over the town looking for candles, but there are none anywhere. We’re going to end up sitting in the dark.”

He was very agitated. His teaspoon was trembling in his hand and rattling against his cup. There were red blotches on his pale cheeks. And I knew that there were indeed no candles to be found anywhere in Biarritz.

They were always irritated, astonished, even sincerely outraged by the need to pay bills. Zinaida Nikolaevna told me indignantly about how they had just had a visit from the man who hired out bed linen.

“The scoundrel just won’t leave us alone. Yesterday he was told that we were out, so he sat in the garden and waited for us. Thanks to that scoundrel we couldn’t even go for a walk.”

There was such childlike naivety in Zinaida Nikolaevna’s irritation that one’s sympathy always went to her rather than to the man whose bill had not been paid.

Thanks to the countess’s influence, Merezhkovsky was given permission to give a lecture in a public hall. The audience was small, and included several German officers who were clearly there in an official capacity. Merezhkovsky spoke so softly that I could barely hear him, even though I was in the front row. I told him as much during the break.

He took offence. “It doesn’t matter. I refuse to speak more loudly. It’ll spoil my modulations. My modulations are superb. I’ve taken great pains over them.”

In the second half he simply whispered. The Germans got up and left. Recently the countess had grown somewhat less interested in Merezhkovsky. She had more important business to attend to. She was elaborating a plan to save France. It was not the first time she had done this. There had been an earlier occasion when, as she liked to tell us, she had balanced the state budget. How? By arranging greyhound races that had brought the government billions of francs in revenue.

Under the countess’s influence, Merezhkovsky had become more gracious towards the Germans (the devils opposing the Bolsheviks). He had even come to see Hitler as a kind of Napoleon.

“Zinaida Nikolaevna! What is it? What’s got into him?” I asked.

“He’s a sycophant. He’s the son of a minor palace official. That’s why he grovels. First before Piłsudski, then before Mussolini. Pure sycophantism.”

Harsh, but all too true, I fear.

Merezhkovsky’s appearance was most peculiar. Small and thin, and in his last years bent completely out of shape. What was remarkable, however, was his face. It was deathly pale, with bright red lips—and when he spoke you saw that his gums were the same bright red. There was something frightening about this. Vampire-like.

He never laughed. Neither of them had the least sense of humour. There was something perverse about Merezhkovsky’s refusal to understand a joke. Sometimes you would deliberately tell them a very funny story just to see their reaction. Utter bewilderment.

“But his answer’s quite wrong,” they would say.

“Yes, and that’s the point of the story. If his answer had been right, I wouldn’t be telling you all this.”

“All right, but why did he answer like that?”

“Because he didn’t understand.”

“Then he’s simply a fool. What’s so interesting about that?”

Nevertheless Zinaida Nikolaevna did appreciate a few lines from a poem by the genuinely witty and talented Don-Aminado.

she would declaim.

Merezhkovsky did not approve.

Zlobin defended Merezhkovsky: “No, he does have a sense of humour. Once he even came up with a play on words.”

More than twenty years of close acquaintance—and a single play on words. Evidently a joker who hid his wit under a bushel.

Zinaida Nikolaevna looked on me with curiosity. To her I was a member of some strange species. She would say, “I absolutely must write about you one day. No one has described you properly yet.”

“It’s too late,” I replied. “I won’t be able to act on your suggestions now, and there’s no changing the opinions of readers. They all made up their minds about me long ago.”

But then a copy of my Witch[6] somehow found its way into their hands—and for some reason they both liked it.

“In this volume you’re conspiring with eternity,” said Zinaida Nikolaevna.

“What language!” said Merezhkovsky. “I’m lapping it up, lapping it up!”

Then he added, “You’re nothing like your work. Zina is like her work, but you aren’t. This book is a delight.”

“Heavens!” I exclaimed. “You’re trying to tell me that I’m an abomination. How awful. But I don’t think there’s much we can do about it now.”

“But why do you give so much space in your work to the comical? I don’t much care for the comical,” Merezhkovsky once said to me.

Not “humour”, but “the comical”. Probably his way of showing contempt.

I reminded him of Gogol’s words about humour.

“Listen: ‘Laughter is deeper and more significant than people think. At its bottom lies an eternally pulsating spring which lends greater depth to any subject. Even he who fears nothing else on earth fears mockery. Yet there are some who are unaware of laughter’s remarkable power. Many say that humour is base; only when something is pronounced in stern, laboured tones do they acknowledge it as sublime.’”[7]

Merezhkovsky was terribly offended: “My tones aren’t in the least laboured.”

“Of course they aren’t. Everyone knows about your modulations. This wasn’t written about you.”

Zinaida Nikolaevna often quoted from her own poems. Merezhkovsky did not like her recent work.

“Zina, these are not poems.”

“Yes, they are,” she insisted.

“No, they’re not,” he shouted.

I intervened: “I think I can reconcile you. Of course they’re poems. They have metre and rhyme—all the formal elements of verse. But they’re verse rather than poetry, prose thoughts in verse form.”

They both accepted this. Now that they had read Witch, I was no longer she but Teffi.

I remember falling ill and spending nearly a month in bed. The Merezhkovskys visited regularly, and once, to the astonishment of everyone in the room, Dmitry Sergeyevich brought a paper cornet of cherries. He had bought them along the way. We all exchanged glances, our faces all saying the same thing: “And there we were, thinking he has no heart.”

Merezhkovsky asked sternly for a dish and said the cherries should be washed.

“Dmitry Sergeyevich,” I said sweetly. “It’s all right, I’m not frightened. There’s no cholera now.”

“I know,” he said grimly. “But I’m still frightened.”

He sat in the corner and, noisily spitting out the stones, ate every last cherry. It was so funny that those present were afraid to look at one another lest they burst out laughing.

I was preoccupied by this strange man for a long time. I kept looking for something in him and not finding it. I remembered “Sakya Muni”, Merezhkovsky’s poem about how the Buddha, the Sage of the Shakhya clan,[8] moved by the suffering of a lowly thief who had said to him “Lord of the World, you are wrong”, had bowed his crowned head to the ground. This hymn to humility—from the pen of Merezhkovsky!

And then, one day not long before his death, after they had returned to Paris disappointed by their German patrons and with no money at all—they had even had to sell a gold pen some Italian writers had presented to them during Merezhkovsky’s Mussolini period[9]—the three of us were sitting together and Zinaida Nikolaevna remarked of someone, “Yes, people really do love him.”

“Nonsense!” interrupted Merezhkovsky. “Absolute nonsense! No one loves. No one is loved.”

There was something desperate behind this. These were not idle words. Merezhkovsky’s whole face had darkened. Dear God! What torments this man must have been going through in the black pit he inhabited… I felt fear for him, and pain.

“Dmitry Sergeyevich! What makes you say that? It’s just that you don’t see people. You don’t really notice them.”

“Nonsense. I do notice people.”

I may be wrong, but in his words I had heard both longing and despair. I thought of his most recent poem, “O Loneliness, O Poverty”. And I thought of Gogol’s Khoma Brut. The dead sorceress’s coffin flying just above his head. It was terrifying.

“Dmitry Sergeyevich! You truly don’t notice people. I know I’m always laughing at you, but really I love you.”

It was as if, with these words, I were making the sign of the cross over myself.

For a moment he seemed at a loss; then he recovered himself: “I think it’s my works you love—not me.”

“No, Dmitry Sergeyevich, I love you, as a human being.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he turned and went slowly to his room. He came back and handed me a photograph of himself, with an affectionate inscription.

I have this photograph still.

ILYA REPIN

I did not see Repin often. He lived in Finland and came only seldom to Petersburg.

But one day Kaplan, from the publishing house “Dog Rose”,[1] came round with a letter from Repin. Repin very much liked my story “The Top”.[2] “It moved me to tears,” he wrote. And this had made him want to paint my portrait.

This, of course, was a great honour for me. We agreed on a date and time, and Kaplan took me along in his car.

It was winter. Cold. Snowstorms. All very miserable. With its squat dachas deep in snow, Kuokkala was not welcoming. The sky was also very low, even darker than the earth and breathing out cold. After Petersburg, with its loud voices, with its whistles and car horns, the village seemed very quiet. The snow lay in deep drifts and there could have been a bear beneath every one of them, fast asleep, sucking its paw.

Repin greeted us warmly. He took us into his studio and showed us his latest work. Then we sat down for a late breakfast at his famous round table. The table had two levels. On the top level, which revolved, were all kinds of dishes; you moved it round and helped yourself to whatever you fancied. On the lower level were containers for the dirty plates and bowls. It was all very convenient, and fun—like having a picnic. The food was vegetarian, and there was a lot of variety. Some of our more serious eaters, though, would complain after a visit that they’d been given nothing but hay. In the railway station on the way back home, they’d go to the buffet and fill up on meat rissoles, which would by then have grown cold.

After breakfast—work.

Repin seated me on a little dais and then sat down below me. He was looking up at me, which seemed very strange. I’ve sat for a number of artists—Alexandr Yakovlev, Savely Sorin, Boris Grigoryev, Savely Schleifer[3] and many who are less well known—but no one has ever gone about it so strangely.

He was using coloured pencils, which he didn’t do often. “It’ll be Paris style,” he said with a smile.

He asked someone else who was there to read aloud “The Top”, the story of mine that had made such an impression on him. This made me think of Boris Kustodiev’s account of how, while he was painting his portrait of Nicholas II, the Tsar had read aloud one of my stories of village life. He had read well—and then he had asked if it was really true that the author was a lady.

Repin’s finished portrait of me was something magically tender, unexpected, not at all like his usual, more forceful work.

He promised to give it to me. But I never received it. It was sent to an exhibition in America and, in Repin’s words, “it got stuck in customs”.

I didn’t like to question him too insistently. “He simply doesn’t want to admit that he sold it,” people kept telling me.

It would, in any case, have disappeared during the Revolution, as did all the other portraits of me, as did many beloved things without which I’d thought life would be hardly worth living.

Years later, in Paris, I republished “The Top” in The Book of June, dedicating the story to Repin. I sent a copy of the book to the address I still had for him in Finland. He replied warmly, asking me to send him a few amateur photographs, just as they were, without any retouching. With these to prompt him, he’d be able to recreate the portrait from memory. At the bottom of the letter was a postscript from his daughter, saying that her father was very weak, hardly able to move about at all.

I was touched by this thoughtfulness on Repin’s part, but I was slow to do as he asked. Eventually, however, I did—only to read in a newspaper, the very next day, that Repin had died.

I shall remember this short, rather thin man as someone uncommonly polite and courteous. His manner was always unruffled and he never showed the least sign of irritation. In short: “A man from another age”.

I’ve heard it said that, after pointing out the failings in a work by one of his weaker students, he would add, “Oh, if only I had your brush!”

Even if he didn’t really say this, it’s easy to imagine him coming out with something similar. Repin was modest. People accustomed to praise and flattery usually speak a lot and don’t listen. Speak—rather than converse. Fyodor Chaliapin, Vlas Doroshevich and Leonid Andreyev all strode about the room and held forth. Repin would listen intently to the other person. He conversed.

His wife Natalya Nordman-Severova was a committed vegetarian. She converted her husband. The revolving table was her idea too. When, overcome by jealousy, she left her husband, he remained loyal to vegetarianism. But shortly before his death, growing weaker and weaker, he ate a little curd cheese. This lifted his spirits. Then he decided to eat an egg. And that gave him the strength to get to his feet and even to do some work.[4]

His last note to me read, “I’m waiting for your photos. I’m determined to do your portrait.”

His handwriting was weak. He was not strong enough to paint a portrait.

Not that I had ever really expected anything to come of all this. I’ve never been a collector, never been able to keep hold of things and not let them slip through my hands. When I’ve been asked by fortune tellers to spread out my palms, they always say, with a shake of the head, “No, with hands like that you’ll never be able to hold on to anything.”

There was also a portrait of me by Savely Schleifer. It too had its story.[5]

Schleifer had portrayed me in a white tunic and he’d thrown a deep-blue veil over my head.

I had a friend who particularly loved this portrait. He persuaded me to give it to him and he took it to his estate in the province of Kovno.[6] A true aesthete, close to Mikhail Kuzmin, he hung it in the place of honour and always stood a vase of flowers beneath it.

In 1917 he heard that the peasants had looted his house and gone off with all his books and paintings. He hurried back to his estate to try to rescue his treasures.

He managed to track down a few of them. In one hut he found my portrait, hanging in the icon corner beside Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker and the Iverskaya Mother of God. Thanks to the long white tunic, the blue veil and the vase of dried flowers, the woman who had taken this portrait had decided I was a saint and lit an icon lamp before me.

A likely story…

The palmists were right. I’ve never been able to hold on to anything. Neither portraits, nor poems dedicated to me, nor paintings I’ve been given, nor important letters from interesting people. Nothing at all.

There is a little more preserved in my memory, but even this is gradually, or even rather quickly, losing its meaning, fading, slipping away from me, wilting and dying.

It’s sad to wander about the graveyard of my tired memory, where all hurts have been forgiven, where every sin has been more than atoned for, every riddle unriddled and twilight quietly cloaks the crosses, now no longer upright, of graves I once wept over.[7]