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

LIST OF HISTORICAL FIGURES

LEONID ANDREYEV (1871–1919): an acclaimed writer of short stories, plays and novels, one of the most important figures of Russian literature’s “Silver Age”.

KONSTANTIN BALMONT (1867–1942): one of the founders of Russian Symbolism. He and Teffi’s older sister Mirra Lokhvitskaya were intensely—though probably platonically—emotionally involved during the last ten years of her life.

DEMYAN BEDNY (1883–1945): a revolutionary poet and satirist. Bedny (a pseudonym) means “poor”.

ANDREI BELY (1880–1934): a Symbolist poet and novelist, best known for his novel Petersburg.

NIKOLAI BERDYAEV (1874–1948): a religious philosopher. A Marxist as a young man, he went on to adopt a position that has been described as Christian Existentialist. He was expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922.

J.-WLADIMIR BIENSTOCK, né Vladimir Lvovitch Binshtock (1868–1933): a Russian-born writer and translator into French.

ALEXANDER BOGDANOV (1873–1928): a revolutionary and cultural activist, the founder of the proletarian art movement Proletkult (1918–20).

VALERY BRYUSOV (1873–1924): a prominent poet and critic, among the founders of Russian Symbolism. One of the few Symbolists to give his wholehearted support to the Soviet regime.

SERGEI BULGAKOV (1871–1944): a theologian. Ordained into the priesthood soon after the Revolution, he was expelled from Russia along with other philosophers and religious thinkers in 1922.

FYODOR CHALIAPIN (1873–1938): one of the most famous operatic basses of his day.

DON-AMINADO, real name Aminodav Shpolyansky (1888–1957): a poet and satirist. Like Teffi, he wrote for New Satirikon and other pre-revolutionary journals. Like her, he emigrated to Paris, where he continued to publish poems, articles and stories.

VLAS DOROSHEVICH (1864–1922): a journalist, editor and writer of short stories. Teffi devotes several pages of Memories to him.

ANATOLY FARESOV (1852–1928): a member of an older generation of revolutionaries, the “Populist” movement of the 1860s and 1870s.

DMITRY FILOSOFOV (1872–1940): a literary critic, religious thinker and political activist, co-founder and first literary editor of the illustrated journal Mir iskusstva (World of Art). Close to both Merezhkovsky and Gippius.

ALEXANDER FINN-YENOTAEVSKY (1872–1943): a revolutionary who assumed the pseudonym Yenotaevsky after being exiled for two years to Yenotaevsk in the Arkhangelsk district.

ZINAIDA NIKOLAEVNA GIPPIUS (1869–1945): a Symbolist poet. Along with her husband Dmitry Merezhkovsky, she hosted an important salon. Always flamboyant, she liked to shock both through her behaviour—insulting her guests and wearing male clothes—and through poems that she herself called “personal prayers” but which others saw as blasphemous. She wrote both under her own name and under several male pseudonyms; the best known was “Anton the Extreme”. After the Revolution, she and Merezhkovsky settled in Paris. “The Green Lamp”, a literary and philosophical society they founded, was attended by many of the most important émigré writers. Teffi ends a separate memoir of Gippius by telling how, after her death, she whispered over her coffin the words, “Friend whom I did not know for long, you did not want to be kind and warm. You wanted to be vicious. Because that is more vivid, isn’t it? As for the sweet tenderness that your soul loved in secret, you hid it in embarrassment from the eyes of others.”

MAXIM GORKY (1868–1936): claimed by the Soviet regime as the father of Socialist Realism, Gorky published his first book, to great acclaim, in 1898. His subject matter was drawn from the lives of the very lowest social strata. From 1905 until 1918 he was closely involved with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, living for much of this period in Capri. His fame as a writer was worldwide and he was able to provide the Bolsheviks with substantial financial support. In 1918, however, he attacked Lenin and the Soviet regime as criminal and tyrannical; for most of the period from 1921 until 1928 he once again lived in exile. In 1932 he accepted a personal invitation from Stalin to return to the Soviet Union. There he became a (possibly reluctant) cultural figurehead for the Soviet regime.

SERGEI GUSEV (1874–1933): a member of the Bolshevik faction from its inception in 1903.

ALEXANDER IZMAILOV (1873–1921): a journalist and literary critic.

LEV KAMENEV (1883–1936): one of the most important of Lenin’s colleagues. A member of the Central Committee during the 1920s, he was shot in 1936, after being sentenced in the first of the Moscow Show Trials.

YEVTIKHY KARPOV (1857–1926): a playwright and theatre director.

MIKHAIL KATKOV (1818–87): a notoriously reactionary journalist.

ALEXANDER KERENSKY (1881–1970): a leading member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (the SRs); prime minister of the Provisional Government from 8th July until 25th October 1917.

ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI (1872–1952): a Bolshevik from 1914, famous for her radical views on marriage and sexuality.

ALEXANDER KUGEL (1864–1928): a theatre critic who in 1908 co-founded The Crooked Mirror, a theatre that specialized in parodies and put on two of Teffi’s plays.

ALEXANDER KUPRIN (1870–1938): a popular writer of short stories and novels.

BORIS KUSTODIEV (1878–1927): a painter and stage designer. His portrait of Nicholas II, painted in 1915, can be seen in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg.

MIKHAIL KUZMIN (1872–1936): one of the finest poets of his time. He also wrote plays and composed music. In 1906 he published Wings, the first Russian novel with an overtly homosexual theme; two large editions sold out at once.

NIKOLAI LEIKIN (1841–1906): editor of Oskolki (Splinters), the comic journal in which Chekhov published his first stories.

L.A. LINYOV (1853–1920): worked on the Stock Exchange Gazette between 1893 and 1896.

MAXIM LITVINOV (1876–1951): an Old Bolshevik, i.e. a member of the Bolshevik Party from before 1917. Soviet ambassador to the USA from 1941 to 1943.

MIRRA LOKHVITSKAYA (1869–1905): Teffi’s older sister Maria, greatly admired during her lifetime for her often boldly erotic poetry. Teffi wrote surprisingly seldom about Mirra; it is possible that she always felt in some way overshadowed by her.

ANATOLY LUNACHARSKY (1875–1933): a leading Bolshevik; after the Revolution, the first People’s Commissar for Culture and Education.

MARTYN MANDELSTAM (1872–1947): a journalist; later a Soviet functionary.

DMITRY MEREZHKOVSKY (1865–1941): a Symbolist poet and novelist, married to Zinaida Gippius. He was nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

NIKOLAI MINSKY (1855–1937): a minor poet, close to Merezhkovsky and Gippius.

VLADIMIR NEMIROVICH-DANCHENKO (1858–1943): a theatre critic, playwright and director; co-founder, with Konstantin Stanislavsky, of the Moscow Art Theatre.

NATALYA NORDMAN-SEVEROVA (1863–1914): a writer; Ilya Repin’s second wife.

JÓZEF KLEMENS PIŁSUDSKI (1867–1935): a Polish statesman, the person most responsible for the creation of the Second Republic of Poland in 1918. He was Chief of State from 1918 to 1922, and the republic’s de facto leader for the rest of his life.

GEORGY PLEKHANOV (1856–1918): a Russian revolutionary and one of the first Russian Marxists.

STANISLAV PROPPER (c.1853–1931): an Austrian immigrant, he acquired the Stock Exchange Gazette in 1880. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he emigrated to Germany.

ALEXEI REMIZOV (1877–1957): a Symbolist, almost surrealist, writer whose work drew on Russian folklore and old Russian literature. He emigrated to Berlin in 1921, and to Paris in 1923.

ILYA REPIN (1844–1930): probably the greatest of all Russian realist painters.

VASILY ROZANOV (1856–1919): a highly controversial writer and philosopher. His best work is deeply personal, much of it an attempt to reconcile Christian teachings with an assertion of the importance of sexuality and family life. His emphasis on the phallus has led to his being referred to as “the Rasputin of the Russian intelligentsia” (Klaus von Beyme, Politische Theorien im Zeitalter der Ideologien, Wiesbaden 2002, pp. 604–05). Himself a somewhat Dostoevskian figure, he married Polina Suslova, a woman twice his age who had once been Dostoevsky’s mistress. In 1919 he died of starvation.

PYOTR RUMYANTSEV (1859–1929): a colleague of Lenin’s in 1905, he abandoned politics two years later.

SKITALETS, “the Wanderer” (1869–1941): the son of a former serf, he was a poet and writer, and a disciple of Gorky, whom he first met in 1897.

DIOMID TOPURIDZE (1871–1942), also known by his pseudonym Karsky: a Georgian Menshevik.

VERGEZHSKY, pseudonym of Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams (1869– 1962): a Russian journalist, founder member of the Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) party and a campaigner for women’s rights.

LUDMILA VILKINA-MINSKAYA (1873–1920): a poet, Minsky’s second wife.

MARKO VOVCHOK (1833–1907): pseudonym of Maria Vilinska, who wrote in both Ukrainian and Russian. Her acclaimed volume of Ukrainian folk tales was translated into Russian by Ivan Turgenev.

ANNA VYRUBOVA (1884–1964): a close friend of the Tsaritsa and an intermediary between Rasputin and the royal family. She was also a childhood friend of Prince Felix Yusupov, who played a major role in the plot to murder Rasputin.

BORIS VYSHESLAVTSEV (1877–1954): a Russian philosopher and religious thinker.

PRINCE FELIX YUSUPOV (1887–1967): married the niece of the last tsar. He was one of the three participants in the murder of Rasputin, on 30th December 1916, in the Yusupov Palace.

THE ZAITSEVS: the family of the writer Boris Zaitsev (1881–1972), who emigrated from Russia to Paris in 1922. Teffi was, for many years, close to the whole family and was particularly fond of Natasha, the young daughter who is the central character of “The White Flower”. In a letter to Boris Zaitsev from around September 1925 Teffi wrote: “As for my tenderness toward you, never doubt it, because it’s organic. Not only spiritual, but bodily. We are of the same tribe… Our blood, the smell of our skin, its color, our soft hair, everything is of the same sort—our own” (Edith Haber, forthcoming biography of Teffi, chapter 7). In the Russian text of “The White Flower” Teffi refers to the Zaitsevs merely by their initial: “Z”.

VLADIMIR ZLOBIN (1894–1967): the Merezhkovskys’ secretary and closest friend. He left Russia together with them in 1919 and he shared an apartment with them in Paris. After their deaths he took care of their archive and wrote a memoir, Difficult Soul (Tyazhelaya Dusha), about Zinaida Gippius.