Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me

NOTES

1

A common French idiom. Here, the sense is “Well, that’s just too bad.”

1

Taffy is the name of a young British art student in Trilby, a novel by George du Maurier; it is also the name of a young girl in one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. And “Taffy was a Welshman” is the first line of a well-known English nursery rhyme. Teffi gives these two lines in English, misquoting and misspelling as here. She is, presumably, reproducing how she used to say these lines as a child. In this apparently autobiographical article Teffi is, as always, being playful. In reality, she first used the pseudonym “Teffi” as early as 1901, six years before the first performances of The Woman Question (Elena Trubilova, in Na ostrove moikh vospominanii (Tikhvin, 2016), p. 12).

2

Not all English vowel sounds have exact Russian equivalents. The standard Russian transliteration of “Taffy” is “Тэффи” (Teffi).

1

It is unclear whether Teffi had one or two elder brothers. There is documentary evidence only for one elder brother, Nikolai Lokhvitsky (1867–1933), who attended military school and by the end of the First Word War had attained the rank of lieutenant general. Here, however, we have an elder brother attending a lycée rather than a military school and there are two other stories (“Love” and “The Scarecrow”) in which Nikolai is presented as the second of two brothers (Haber, chapter 1). The biographical truth is, at present, impossible to establish with certainty. On the one hand, Teffi presents her stories simply as stories, not as biographical memoirs; on the other hand, it is odd that she so often mentions having two brothers.

2

Typically a peasant woman employed first as a wet-nurse to a baby and then kept on as a household servant. Often she was more deeply involved with a child’s life than its mother.

3

The illustrated journal Sever (The North), founded in 1887.

4

Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya studied in the Liteiny Girls’ School in Mokhovaya Street, St Petersburg. The school celebrated its twentieth jubilee in 1884. The Tsaritsa would have been Maria Fyodorovna, wife of Alexander III.

5

Journals of the time often had a “post bag”, a section where authors of manuscripts submitted for approval were publicly offered advice and criticism.

1

When Teffi was a child, her family—like many upper-class Russian families—spent each autumn and winter in St Petersburg and each spring and summer in their country estate. In their case, this was Teffi’s mother’s estate, in Volhynia, in what is now Western Ukraine—a remote and exotic area at this time even for Russians. The children saw little of the families of other landowners, most of whom were Poles, and had more contact with ordinary villagers. Teffi appears to have been the fifth child in the family and to have felt closest to Lena, her youngest sister.

2

For Orthodox Christians, the day before Easter Sunday—the day Christ descended into Hell—is a day of fasting and mourning. The last service of the day, the Easter Vigil, reaches its climax at midnight, with the celebration of Christ’s resurrection.

1

He is probably limping in imitation of Lord Byron. For more on Teffi’s brother(s), see “My First Visit to an Editorial Office”, note 1.

2

A baba is a peasant woman; neckweed is another name for hemp.

3

In her autobiographical sketch “Kishmish”, Teffi explains that a kishmish is a kind of small raisin from the Caucasus and that she was given this nickname because, until she suddenly grew quite tall towards the age of thirteen, she was exceptionally short. Her shortness—and this nickname—greatly upset her.

4

Martha, or Richmond Fair (1847) by the German composer Friedrich von Flotow (1812–83).

5

The heroine of many Russian folk tales, here confused with Helen of Troy.

1

See “Love”, note 3.

2

Twenty years later, in 1947, Teffi ended her article about Baba Yaga, the archetypal old witch of Russian folk tales, with an almost identical single word paragraph: “B-o-r-i-n-g” (“Sku-u-uchno”). She was clearly alluding to this story, which ends with the same word. As an adolescent Teffi wanted to be a Cleopatra; in 1947, in her mid-seventies, she sees herself as Baba Yaga. See Robert Chandler, Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (London: Penguin Classics 2012). In this translation we have drawn the word out, in order to lend it the appropriate emotional weight; Teffi draws the word out in her 1947 article, but not in “The Green Devil” itself.

1

Teffi was young when she had her first child, but not as young as this implies. She married in January 1892 and, aged twenty, gave birth to her daughter Valeria in November that year. Her marriage was deeply unhappy and Teffi eventually abandoned her husband and children, returning to St Petersburg and soon beginning to earn her living as a professional writer.

2

A department store in Moscow run from 1880 to 1918 by two Scottish businessmen, on the site of what is now the Central Department Store (TsUM) on Theatre Square. “Dresden ornaments” were, for the main part, produced between 1890 and 1910. They were made from cardboard, dampened to make it flexible, and then gilded, silvered or painted.

1

In this story Liza represents Teffi herself, while Katya is Teffi’s younger sister Lena.

2

Kulich is a sort of spiced Easter bread and paskha is a curd cheesecake.

3

Baba is not only a colloquial Russian word for a woman but also a type of cake.

4

A reference to the biblical story of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon: when Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused to worship him, he had them thrown into a fiery furnace.

5

Masha represents Teffi’s elder sister Mirra Lokhvitskaya, later a well-known poet.

6

A reference to Peter’s denial of Christ. During the Last Supper Jesus predicted that, before the cock crowed the following morning, Peter would deny all knowledge of him. Liza is attending the Holy Thursday service “The Twelve Gospels of the Passion of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ”—a reading of twelve passages from the Gospels relating the betrayal, arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus. The service also includes a procession that re-enacts Christ carrying his cross to Golgotha.

7

A famous romance composed by Yelizaveta Kochubey (1821–97).

8

This last section of the story evidently takes place during the Russian Civil War. After being evacuated from Odessa in April 1919, Teffi was on board a small ship bound for Novorossiisk, the Black Sea port from which she soon afterwards set off for Constantinople. For a more extensive treatment of this episode see Teffi, Memories, chapters 17–23, esp. 23.

1

This story is set in the 1920s, when Teffi was living in Paris.

2

A Russian literary journal published in Paris from 1920 to 1940.

3

Soon after the October Revolution there was an official reform of the Russian alphabet, the aim being to simplify the spelling. Many émigré publications, however, continued to use the old orthography for several more decades.

4

A pacifist Christian sect, the Dukhobors rejected both the tsarist regime and the Orthodox Church. Many emigrated to Canada in the early twentieth century.

5

Here Teffi touches on controversies within Russian Orthodoxy. Earlier in the story one of the speakers casually equated Lenin with Judas. Praying for Judas is considered a sin, in part because he was a suicide, but more importantly because of his role in condemning God to death. Lenin, like Judas, may be considered a traitor, but that is not relevant to the question of whether or not one should pray for him. Most White Russians, naturally, would have found it hard to bring themselves to pray for Lenin. Natasha’s desire—or rather need—to pray for him is an indication of her extraordinary open-heartedness; it may also be Teffi’s delicate way of hinting to the émigré community that it is better not to identify matters of faith with matters of political ideology.

1

Russia’s defeat in this war (1904–05) further undermined the authority of the already unstable regime.

2

Volna, first published in March 1906.

3

A play by the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler.

4

A radical satirical journal produced by the journalist Nikolai Shebuev in 1905–06. The back page of the first issue carried a photograph of the Tsar’s “October Manifesto” with a bloody handprint across it and the caption “Major General Trepov had a hand in this document”. Trepov had played an important role in the suppression of the many strikes and rebellions that swept Russia in 1905. Only five issues of the journal were printed. Shebuev was arrested and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.

5

Wheatfield (Niva) was an illustrated weekly journal. It presented a wide selection of good quality literature to a broad readership.

6

The word “bison” (zubr) came to be used to refer to reactionary members of the Duma (the Russian parliament) drawn from the landowning classes. The nickname hints at an analogy between the official protection afforded such figures and the conservation of “endangered species” close to extinction. (With thanks to Boris Dralyuk for help with this note.

7

Konstantin Platonov, son of Senator S.F. Platonov.

8

The Russian Social Democratic Party was a revolutionary socialist party formed in 1898. In 1903 it split into two factions: the Bolsheviks (led by Lenin) and the Mensheviks.

9

“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in our Party)”, was published in Geneva in 1904.

10

After a period of internal exile in Russia, Lenin had left for Geneva in 1900. At the time Switzerland was something of a hotbed of radicalism—a number of Russian revolutionaries studied at the universities of Geneva and Zurich.

11

Stock Exchange Gazette (Birzhevye vedemosti) was a liberal St Petersburg paper to which Teffi was a regular contributor. In 1917 it was closed by the Bolsheviks.

12

This plan by the mayor of St Petersburg, P. Lelyanov, to fill in the Catherine Canal (Yekaterinsky Canal, now the Griboyedov Canal) was never put into effect.

13

In his introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggle in France (1895), Engels describes barricade battles and armed insurrections as “obsolete” and all too likely to end in failure.

14

New Life (Novaya Zhizn’), the first legal Bolshevik newspaper, was published in St Petersburg from 27th October until 3rd December 1905.

15

The tsarist security service, the Okhrana, made extensive use of secret agents, both to gather information and to subvert revolutionary groups from within.

16

A Russian Orthodox workers’ organization. In January 1905 a peaceful workers’ demonstration led by Father Gapon ended with the Imperial Guard firing on demonstrators, killing about 200 people and wounding about 800. The day went down in history as “Bloody Sunday”.

17

Life Questions (Voprosy Zhizni) a literary and philosophical journal.

18

Linyov worked on Stock Exchange Gazette between 1893 and 1896; this episode thus appears to have taken place before Teffi’s involvement with New Life. Gorky, however, only moved to St Petersburg in 1899. Teffi’s account may be inaccurate.

19

To start a newspaper, one required official permission from the Ministry of the Interior.

20

Clearly Minsky’s poem had some success. There is at least one account of an educated person being convinced that it was Minsky, rather than Marx, who first came up with the phrase “Workers of the World Unite” (Korney Chukovsky, diary entry for 13th September 1927, in Dnevnik 1901–1929 by Korney Chukovsky (Moscow: Sovremenny pisatel, 1997), pp. 413–4).

21

The title of the original is “Plehve and his Chaff” (“Pleve i ego pleveli”). Viacheslav von Plehve (1846–1904), Russian Minister of the Interior, was assassinated in 1904 in St Petersburg by a terrorist bomb.

22

As Governor of St Petersburg, Trepov played an important part in suppressing the 1905 Revolution. See “New Life”, note 4.

23

A strike by railway workers, one of the many rebellions and strikes that swept the country in 1905.

24

An anonymous popular song from the time of the French revolution, a rallying cry for revolutionaries.

25

Any activities considered subversive, including publishing inflammatory political material, could lead to a spell of internal exile. Those found guilty of serious crimes were sent to Siberia; being sent to a provincial town like Oryol was a lesser punishment.

26

Misquoted from a poem by Nikolai Nekrasov, “The Forgotten Village” (1864). This describes peasants waiting in vain for the master to come and sort out their problems.

27

Sonia Marmeladova: the young heroine of Crime and Punishment, who sacrifices her honour by becoming a prostitute to save her family. Sonia’s appearance in the novel is described as follows: “…strange was her sudden appearance in this room, amidst the beggary, rags, death and despair. She too wore rags; her get-up was cheap, but it came with all the adornments of the street, as the rules and etiquette of that special world demanded, with its shamingly flagrant purpose. […] She’d quite forgotten about her fourth-hand, colourful silk dress, utterly out of place here with its ridiculously long train, and about her enormous crinoline obstructing the doorway, and her bright shoes and her parasol, which she’d taken with her even though it was night, and the ridiculous round straw hat with a feather the colour of fire.” (Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, tr. Oliver Ready (London: Penguin Classics, 2014).) Teffi’s implication is that the girl with Gusev is also a prostitute.

28

A reference to a pamphlet by Lenin. See “New Life”, note 9.

29

An ultra-nationalist Russian movement that supported the tsarist principles of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and nationality and was fiercely hostile to both revolutionaries and Jews. Its members were drawn from a variety of social classes.

30

“The Union of the Russian People”, one of the Black Hundred groups, met regularly at the Tver café in St Petersburg, offering free tea and food to unemployed workers.

31

The term “pogrom” was most often used of mass acts of violence against Jews. Jews and revolutionaries, however, were often conflated, especially in the minds of the Black Hundreds and other extreme nationalists.

32

The article in question, “The Dying Autocracy and the New Organs of Party Rule”, was published in November 1905. Minsky was arrested and released on bail.

33

Russian external passports of this period included several pages intended for foreign border guards. Written in French, German and English, these stated the traveller’s name and social class. (With thanks to Yevgeny Slivkin.)

34

In 1917, after the February Revolution and the abdication of the Tsar, the Provisional Government continued the war against Germany. Wanting to destabilize the Russian war effort, the German government provided Lenin with a sealed railway carriage and a large sum of money, enabling him to make his way from neutral Switzerland, across Germany, and into Russia. The Bolsheviks were, at the time, the only Russian political party unambiguously committed to making peace with Germany.

1

“Madame V——” probably refers to Anna Vyrubova (see List of Historical Figures). Elsewhere in this memoir Teffi refers to her by name, but this may well be a minor inconsistency on her part.

2

Grigory (or Grisha) Rasputin is often referred to as a monk, but he never took holy orders and had no official connection to the Orthodox Church. Here Teffi uses the vaguer term “elder”. Rasputin was also rumoured to have belonged to an extreme sect known as the Khlysts, but this has never been proven. There is no doubt, however, that he lived the life of a religious “wanderer” for several years and was widely believed to be endowed with healing powers.

3

Often the subject of lurid speculation, the Khlysts observed ascetic practices and ecstatic rituals as a way of attaining grace.

4

A town fifteen miles from the centre of St Petersburg, the location of the Russian royal family’s summer palace.

5

After its acquisition by Alexey Suvorin in 1876, New Times (Novoye Vremya) became one of the most successful papers in Russia. Though reactionary and anti-Semitic, it published some of Russia’s most important writers, including Anton Chekhov.

6

The Orthodox term for the women who, early in the morning of the third day, came to Christ’s tomb and found it empty.

7

Alexey Filippov was a banker and the publisher of writings by Rasputin. Ivan Manasevich-Manuilov was a police agent. According to Edward Radzinsky, Manasevich-Manuilov had “suggested that Filippov organize a literary soirée, and he himself had told Tsarskoye Selo about the soirée, attributing the initiative to Filippov. And he had passed on to the security branch […] the list of literary invitees. All the people on it were well-known ‘leftist writers’. Which was why there had been a call from Tsarskoye Selo interrupting the meeting” (Rasputin: The Last Word (London: Phoenix, 2000), p. 403). Manasevich-Manuilov had evidently wanted to compromise Filippov both in the eyes of the authorities and in the eyes of Rasputin himself. In the original, Teffi refers to Filippov and Manasevich-Manuilov only by their initial letters.

1

A tulup is a large sheepskin coat, usually worn by men. A zipun is a coat that flares from the waist, often seen as typically Cossack.

2

Shortly before the October Revolution the Bolsheviks made the Smolny, previously a government building, into their administrative headquarters.

3

Kangaroo was one of the furs used in military uniforms in Russia, together with squirrel and sheepskin. Ordinary soldiers usually had sheepskin collars.

4

A phrase used by Lenin to refer to the distribution of capital.

5

A term used in Marxist theory to describe the abandonment, as capitalism developed, of the collective solidarity characteristic of feudalism.

6

See “New Life”, note 31. Though most often used of right-wing violence against Jews, this term was also used of murderous rampages by revolutionary crowds.

7

Patriarch Nikon, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, pronounced an anathema on the Bolsheviks in January 1918.

8

Bread rationing was introduced by the Provisional Government in March 1917, and bread continued to be rationed—as well as being adulterated with other substances—under “War Communism” (1918–21). In The Black Notebooks (her diary of the post-revolutionary period), Zinaida Gippius writes that “the ration of bread ‘with straw’ is ⅛ of a pound”, i.e. a little under two ounces per person (entry for February 1918).

1

See “New Life”, note 29.

2

An allusion to Genesis vii, where God tells Noah, “Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and the female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and the female.” In the biblical story, the beasts do not devour one another.

1

A reference to Bely’s “Memories of Blok”, published in Berlin in 1922–23. Merezhkovsky’s habit of wearing carpet slippers with pompoms is mentioned by several other memoirists.

2

From Nikolai Gogol’s story “Viy”.

3

In June 1940, as the German army advanced on Paris, around three quarters of the city’s population fled in panic. Many of the Russian émigrés went to Biarritz, though this too was soon under German occupation.

4

Merezhkovsky turned seventy-five on 14th August 1940. Zlobin writes in Difficult Soul that, to help them financially, their friends organized a birthday celebration which turned a profit of 7,000 francs.

5

Sobakyevich, an unscrupulous serf owner in Gogol’s Dead Souls, who, despite his name (sobaka is the Russian for “dog”), resembles a bear.

6

Witch, a collection of stories with themes drawn from folklore and the supernatural, was published in 1936.

7

From Gogol’s “A Theatrical Journey” (“Teatralny razezd”), written in response to critics of his play The Government Inspector.

8

Teffi is referring to Merezhkovsky’s early poem “Sakya Muni” (1885), in which a poor thief berates the Buddha for preventing him from stealing one of the Buddha’s gems: the Buddha is immortal and has no need of gems—so why should he deny a mortal thief a way to earn his crust of bread?

9

Throughout his émigré years Merezhkovsky had been hoping to find a strong ruler who could save Europe from Bolshevism. At one time he had placed his hopes in Mussolini, who had sponsored his book about Dante (1939). Merezhkovsky met Mussolini several times. In one of his letters to him he wrote, “The best, the truest and the liveliest document on Dante is—your personality. […] Visualize Mussolini in contemplation, and it’s Dante. Imagine Dante in action, and it’s Mussolini” (Vadim Polonsky, “Merezhkovsky, Dmitry Sergeyevich”, www.krugosvet.ru.; retrieved 2nd February 2010).

1

In 1910 this publishing house (Shipovnik) had published Teffi’s first two books—a collection of poems and a collection of stories.

2

First published in December 1915—a story about an exceptionally fatuous man whose repeated expressions of wonder at life’s everyday miracles bore and exasperate not only his wife but also his small children.

3

All four artists emigrated after the Revolution. Teffi’s Memories includes a brief mention of Schleifer and longer mentions of Yakovlev. The whereabouts of these portraits are unknown; probably they have not survived.

4

Teffi seems unaware of any distinction between vegetarianism and veganism—a distinction perhaps seldom made at this time.

5

Teffi also tells this story in chapter 2 of Memories; some details differ.

6

Then one of the north-western provinces of the Russian empire, now a part of Lithuania—Kovno in Russian, Kaunas in Lithuanian.

7

In 1951 Teffi sent the manuscript of My Chronicle, her collection of short memoirs about writers and other important figures she had known, to the Chekhov Publishing House in New York. The book was not published and the manuscript she sent is now lost. It is, however, possible to establish the titles of many of the articles included—many of them already published in journals. The last paragraph of this memoir of Repin suggests that this piece was intended as a conclusion to the book as a whole.