by Teffi
22. The shtetl Teffi and her companions have just reached is Unechka, in Bryansk province. For a few months this unremarkable town assumed great importance, as the frontier station on the main route between Moscow and Kiev. The Cheka was exceptionally active there, not only seizing valuables from those trying to leave Soviet Russia but also guarding against infiltration from the Ukraine, which, from March until December 1918, was under German occupation.
23. Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) was an influential and innovative theater director. In an article written after his death, Teffi explains that the three corners of his “magic triangle” were the actor, the author, and the director and that Meyerhold believed that the author and the actors should communicate with one another via the director (i.e. along the two short sides of the triangle), rather than directly (i.e. along the hypotenuse). Teffi clearly disagreed with all this, observing sarcastically, “The director always sees the author as the enemy of the play. The author’s observations only mess things up. The author wrote the play, but it is the director, of course, who best understands just what the author wanted to say (Moya letopis’ [Vagrius, 2004], p. 187). As for the young actress, she blends Meyerhold’s terminology with the political jargon of the time; Trotsky, Bukharin, and others often spoke of “parallelograms of forces.” Teffi knew Nikolay Yevreinov well (see note 9); a theater director associated with Russian Symbolism, he spent most of his last thirty years in Paris. Commedia dell’Arte developed in Italy in the sixteenth century; it emerged from Carnival and is characterized by the use of masks and the central role played by such stock characters as Arlecchino (Harlequin) and Pulcinella (Punch). “Theater as collective ritual” alludes to the theories of the Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949). He dreamed of a new type of mass theater—a “collective action,” modeled on ancient religious rituals, Athenian tragedy, and medieval mystery plays.
24. A reference to zaum, the “transrational” or “beyond-mind” language advocated by the Futurist poets Alexey Kruchonykh and Velimir Khlebnikov. It was Kruchonykh who coined this word, brilliantly translated by the late Paul Schmidt as “beyonsense.”
25. This commissar was, in reality, Fruma Khaikina (1897–1977), who adopted the surname “Rostova,” after Natasha Rostova in War and Peace. She was head of the local Cheka and a member of the town’s “RevKom”—that is, Revolutionary Committee. In late 1918 she married Mykola Shchors (1895–1919), a Ukrainian Red Army commander elevated after his death to almost legendary status. She was notorious for her brutality.
26. One of the banknotes issued by the Provisional Government whose last prime minister, in the summer and early autumn of 1917, had been Alexandr Kerensky. The Soviet government continued to print these notes until 1919, so the general was doing nothing illegal.
27. The poem Olyonushka recites is “Angelika” (included in Passiflora, 1923). Fedosya dies alone in a ditch and is taken up by angels into the presence of Christ and the Virgin Mary.
28. In Gogol’s story “Christmas Eve” (1832), the blacksmith makes the sign of the cross over the devil. This forces the devil to let the blacksmith ride on his back.
29. A song written in 1906, to honor those who had died in the Russo-Japanese war of the previous year. During and after the Civil War the song was sung by both Whites and Reds.
30. The Imperial Petersburg Institute of Technology, founded in 1828.
31. A popular satirical magazine. See note 2.
32. A Polish form of address, once the equivalent of the English “Sir.” Since the late nineteenth century, it has been closer to “Mr.”
33. “Where is Moscow?” (Yiddish)
34. “What a little scholar he is!” (Yiddish, probably meant ironically)
35. “The crazy head!” (Yiddish, colloquial)
36. George Boreman was the owner of a successful Petersburg chocolate factory, nationalized in 1918.
37. In an article published in Kiev in January 1919, Teffi is more critical of Russian condescension towards the Ukrainian language. Many of the Ukrainian words that Russians find so risible, she points out, are in fact more Slavonic than their Russian equivalents, which are often borrowings from French or German. She continues, “I cannot understand why they are so irritated by the free existence of the Ukrainian language. [. . .] What has happened? Is it really so terrible to have to learn the couple of dozen words one needs to get by in the Ukraine? Far more terrible are all these mindless ‘orientations,’ ‘evacuations,’ ‘demobilizations,’ and ‘democratizations’ that now litter our Slav speech.” (Teffi v strane vospominanii: LP Media 2011, p. 215)
38. The actress Vera Ilnarskaya (1880–1946) was married to Lolo, a writer with whom Teffi sometimes collaborated. She published the journal The Spotlights and Life (Rampa i zhizn’). See note 8.
39. A salty East European dish made from minced meat, anchovies, or herring, together with onions.
40. Teffi’s train did indeed pass through Gomel, which lies about 300 kilometers to the north of Kiev, in what is now Belarus. Shavli (or Siauliai), however, lies in present-day Lithuania, not far from the Baltic; it could not possibly have been on their route. Gooskin’s geography is confused.
41. “Out!” (German).
42. Olyonushka’s first two words mean, “The exceptions are . . .” She then comes up with a number of verbs that are exceptions to some grammatical rule.
43. “This was in Schöneberg” (a part of Berlin).
44. Schon means “already”; nun means “now.”
45. At the end of the nineteenth century Jews constituted nearly forty percent of the population of Odessa. The ever-alert Gooskin, with his colorful way of speech, answers perfectly to the Russian stereotype of a Jewish Odessan businessman. The quintessential Russianness of his first name and patronymic is therefore unexpected. It is this that makes everyone laugh.
46. Anatoly Durov (1865–1916) and his elder brother Vladimir (1863–1936) were famous trainers of circus dogs. Unlike most trainers before them, who had relied on pain and fear, they used mainly positive encouragement—the carrot rather than the stick.
47. From April until November 1918, the Ukrainian Head of State was titled “the Hetman.”
48. Bolshevik propaganda during these years often pictured capitalism and counterrevolution as a hydra—a monster with many heads.
49. The main street in Kiev, used as a promenade.
50. Leonid Sobinov (1872–1934) was a well-known tenor; he remained in the Soviet Union. Fyodor Kurikhin (1881–1951) was a well-known actor; he too remained in the Soviet Union. Yury Ozarovsky (1869–1924) was an actor, director, theater critic and drama teacher; he died in Paris. Vlas Doroshevich (1864–1922) was a journalist and writer of short stories; after living in the Crimea from autumn 1918, he returned to Petrograd in May 1921 and died there in February 1922. According to the literary historian Yury Kaplan, as many as eighty newspapers, magazines, and almanacs opened in Kiev at this time (Haber, chapter 6). It was widely felt that the realistic theater had had its day, and there was a vogue for cabarets, sketches, and short plays of all kinds. Teffi’s graceful witty playlets—the best-known of which was The Woman Question (1907)—were very popular. Teffi’s daughter Valeria writes: “She personally worked on the staging of her plays, giving the actors very valuable directions and often sketching the designs for the costumes with her own hands.” (Edythe Haber, chapter 3)
51. The Stray Dog was a café in Petersburg, a famous meeting place for writers and poets. Between January 1, 1912, and its closure on March 3, 1915, nearly all the main poets of the time—regardless of their political or artistic affiliations—gave readings there. Part of Teffi’s story “The Dog” (included in Subtly Worded [Pushkin Press, 2014]) is set there.
52. Most likely, this was the actress Maria Zan’kovetska (1854–1934), a key figure in the revival of a Ukrainian national theater.
53. During her three months in Kiev, from October
7, 1918, until January 1919, Teffi published at least twenty articles and sketches, gave public readings, and helped to arrange for the production of several of her plays, as well as writing a new one-act play for the opening night of a new theater (Teffi v strane vospominanii, pp. 11–13). Many thoughts, images and anecdotes from these articles—and from the three or four articles she published in Odessa between January and April 1919—reappear in Memories, in most cases treated with greater sophistication.
54. Symon Petlyura (1879–1926), a writer, journalist and socialist politician, was the leading figure in Ukraine’s unsuccessful struggle for independence. After the February 1917 revolution, he joined the Ukrainian Central Rada (“council”), which in June 1917 proclaimed Ukraine an autonomous republic. Soon after this, however, the Germans occupied Ukraine and established a puppet government led by Pavlo Skoropadsky, who was officially known as “the Hetman” (a historic title that had not been used since the seventeenth century). When the Germans withdrew, Petlyura, now heading the five-member directorate of the Rada, seized power. Petlyura then had to confront both the Reds and the Whites. When the White armies, which had occupied Ukraine and replaced Petlyura’s government at the end of 1918, withdrew in the autumn of 1919, Ukraine fell under Soviet authority. During the Russo-Polish War of 1919–20 Petlyura allied with the Poles. The Poles repelled the Red Army from Poland itself but failed to secure independence for Ukraine.
55. Mikhail Milrud (1883–1942) had previously, like Teffi, worked for the Russian Word. He was on the editorial board of Kiev Thought. From 1924 he edited a Russian-language newspaper in Latvia. Arrested in 1941, he died in the Gulag.
56. Ilya Vasilevsky (1883–1938) was a prominent journalist. Together with his wife, he left Kiev for Odessa and then Constantinople. Vasilevsky later returned to the Soviet Union in 1923. He was shot in the purges: http://www.bulgakov.ru/b/belozerskaya/.
57. In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment Sonya Marmeladova is driven by poverty to prostitute herself. After going out onto the streets for the first time, she comes back home, wraps herself in a drap de dames (a very fine kind of fabric) shawl, and lies down on the bed with her face to the wall.
58. Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–1795) was a famous Italian fraudster, Freemason, and occultist, supposedly gifted with magical powers.
59. Lenin’s biographer, Robert Service, thinks it unlikely that Lenin ever had any contact with Duclos (personal email, April 2015).
60. In November 1918, Teffi published an article titled “Armand Duclos” (Teffi v strane vospominanii, pp. 188–91). Much of it is about the arguments between those who believed in Duclos’s clairvoyant powers and those who saw him as a trickster. In the last fifteen lines, however, Teffi strikes a different note. After emphasizing how everyone, no matter what their social position or political allegiance, asks Duclos essentially the same simple questions about love and happiness, she continues:
Always the same: we want to hold our little human happiness and take it away with us. To a place where no one will steal it from us.
Yes, the most ambitious, most ascetic, most ideologically committed builder of a new life, just like a simple stonemason, feels the need to come back home in the evening. To light his lamp, open his book, and smile into affectionate, loving eyes.
Armand Duclos! Brilliant clairvoyant! Look closely—will we yet meet happiness and be able to hold onto it? Surely we must!
How pitiful we all are.
61. Vladimir Vinnichenko (1880–1951) was a leading Ukrainian writer and nationalist politician. He was the chairman of the council of five, “the Directorate,” that ruled much of Ukraine in late 1918 and early 1919. Petlyura was a member of this Directorate, as well as commander of its army.
62. The Hetman, Skoropadsky, had been supported by the Germans. When the Germans withdrew, many of his officers and soldiers deserted and went over to Petlyura and the Directorate. See note 54.
63. The Kiev Pechersk Lavra. This cave monastery, founded in 1051 by Orthodox monks from Mount Athos, is believed to contain the uncorrupted bodies of saints from the days of Kievan Rus, the medieval Slav kingdom that embraced Christianity in 988. Present-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are all descended from this first important kingdom of eastern Slavs.
64. In “Slain Servants of the Lord,” an article published in Kiev in December 1918, Teffi wrote:
Horror, and words about death, no matter with how much emotion they are pronounced, no longer disturb us. They are now our simple, everyday vocabulary, as normal for us as “health” or “money.”
They do not call up any vivid, or painful, image in our minds.
“Where’s A?”
“Seems he’s been shot.”
“Where’s B?”
“Seems he’s still alive.”
We all seem to be alive, or maybe we seem to have died.
There in that “seems” we sway, like ghosts in the mist on a moonlit night.
65. A woman’s perfume, created by Jacques Guerlain in 1908.
66. Alexey Grishin-Almazov (1880–1919) was, during much of 1918, in command of the White armies in western Siberia. He then moved to the south of Russia. In December 1918, the French, then in control of Odessa, appointed him military governor.
67. Vladimir Burtsev (1862–1942) was a historian and journalist who served time in prison under both the tsarist and Soviet regimes. His newspaper The Common Cause went through several different incarnations: in 1909–10, 1917, 1918–22 and 1928–33.
68. A once-famous novel by Semyon Yushkevich (1868–1927). It is set largely in Odessa.
69. An infamous Odessa gangster, Jewish revolutionary, and Soviet military leader.
70. The Moldavanka was a poor part of Odessa, with a reputation for criminality. The writer Isaak Babel was born there, and it provides the setting for his “Odessa Tales,” a cycle of stories about the life of Jewish gangsters.
71. This paragraph is, in effect, a condensed version of “The Last Breakfast,” the last article Teffi published in Odessa. See appendix, p. 231.
72. Fyodor Blagov (1886–1934), the last editor of the Russian Word, emigrated to China, where he worked for Russian newspapers in Harbin and Shanghai.
73. Maximilian Voloshin (1877–1932) was a leading figure among the Russian Symbolist poets of the early twentieth century. For over a decade his large house in Koktebel, where he both wrote and painted, was a refuge for writers and artists of all political and artistic persuasions. Among his hundreds of guests were Maxim Gorky, Nikolay Gumilyov, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Marina Tsvetaeva. In 1924 the house became a “House of Creativity” for Soviet writers, the first of the many such closed-access hotels that were a central part of the Soviet cultural world. In spite of a number of facile professions of faith in Russia’s purification through suffering, Voloshin’s poems about the Civil War and the subsequent Red Terror in the Crimea are courageous and incisive. Voloshin was steadfast in his refusal to accept any ideology as absolute truth. A poem titled “Civil War” ends:
And from the ranks of both armies
I hear one and the same voice:
“He who is not with us is against us.
You must take sides. Justice is ours.”
And I stand alone in the midst of them,
amidst the roar of fire and smoke,
and pray with all my strength for those
who fight on this side, and on that side.
Voloshin’s belief in the power of his words—what Marianna Landa refers to as “his Dostoevskian faith in the divine spark in the soul of the abominable criminal, and his Symbolist belief in the magic of the poetic word”—seems to have been unshakeable; his personal appeals to Red and White officials and commanders, on behalf of individuals in trouble, and his verse-prayers addressed to God, on behalf of his country, have much in common. Voloshin believed he could affect the course of events—and sometimes he did. That he escaped arrest and execution is as
tonishing. See The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015, ed. Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski), pp. 175–180. For a somewhat more critical view of Voloshin, see Ivan Bunin, Cursed Days, pp. 82, 112. Much about Voloshin evidently enraged Bunin. In a diary entry for April 16, 1919, he writes, “Voloshin visited us [. . .] It was monstrous! He said he had spent all day with Severny, the head of the local Cheka, who has a ‘soul like crystal.’ That’s just what he said: ‘like crystal.’ ”(ibid. p. 85) Nevertheless, Bunin’s wife writes in her own diary, September 6, 1919, “Valya [Kataev] lashed out at Voloshin. For some reason he can’t stand him. [Bunin] defended Voloshin, saying that though his verse is wordy, something genuine and personal shines forth from it. ‘There are too few Voloshins around for you to be negative toward him. How well Voloshin has sung of his country. How very good are his portraits.’ ” (Thomas Gaitan Marullo, Ivan Bunin: Russian Requiem [Ivan Dee, 1993], p. 346.)
74. Grigory (or Grishka) Otrepyev, popularly known as “The False Dmitry,” was a monk who claimed to be Dmitry, the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible. He reigned for eleven months during 1605–6.
75. Yelizaveta Kuzmina-Karavayeva (1891–1945) was elected deputy mayor of the southern Russian town of Anapa in 1918. When the Whites captured the town, she was put on trial as a Bolshevik but acquitted. Her judge, Daniil Skobtsov, who had once been her teacher, then married her; their marriage (her second) fell apart in the late 1920s, but her writings are often published under her married name of Skobtsova. In 1932, in Paris, she took monastic vows, assuming the name of Mother Maria. During World War II she helped many Jews to escape the Nazis, often by providing them with baptismal certificates, but she was eventually sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. In March 1945, a week before the camp was liberated by the Red Army, she was sent to the gas chamber; according to one testimony, she voluntarily took the place of a Jewish woman. In 2004 she was canonized as a saint by the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople. See also The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, pp. 188–89 and p. 547, note 22.