Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me
Page 1
TEFFI (1872–1952) was the pen name of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, born in St. Petersburg into a distinguished family that treasured literature. She and her three sisters all became writers. Teffi wrote in a variety of styles and genres: political feuilletons published in a Bolshevik newspaper during her brief period of radical fervor after the 1905 Revolution; Symbolist poems that she declaimed or sang in Petersburg literary salons; popular one-act plays, mostly humorous or satirical—one was entitled The Woman Question; and a novel titled simply Adventure Novel. Her finest works are her short stories and Memories, a witty, tragic, and deeply perceptive account of her last journey across Russia and what is now Ukraine, before going by boat to Istanbul in the summer of 1919. Teffi was widely read; her admirers included not only such writers as Bunin, Bulgakov, and Zoshchenko, but also both Lenin and the last tsar. In pre-Revolutionary Russia, candies and perfumes were named after her; after the Revolution, her stories were published and her plays performed throughout the Russian diaspora. She died in Paris.
ROBERT CHANDLER’s translations from Russian include Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (an NYRB classic); Nikolay Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; Vasily Grossman’s An Armenian Sketchbook, Everything Flows, Life and Fate, and The Road (all NYRB classics); and Hamid Ismailov’s Central Asian novel, The Railway. His co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won prizes both in the UK and in the US. He is the editor and main translator of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov. Together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski he has co-edited The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. He has also translated selections of Sappho and Apollinaire. As well as running regular translation workshops in London and teaching the annual Translate in the City literary translation course, he works as a mentor for the British Centre for Literary Translation.
ELIZABETH CHANDLER is a co-translator, with Robert Chandler, of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and of several titles by Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman.
ROSE FRANCE has translated poems by Lermontov for the collection After Lermontov: Verses for the Centenary (2014) and a number of stories and sketches by Teffi and Zoshchenko for two forthcoming anthologies. She teaches Russian language, literature, and translation at the University of Edinburgh and translation at the University of Stirling.
ANNE MARIE JACKSON has lived for extended periods in Russia and Moldova. She is a co-translator, with Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, and Irina Steinberg, of Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (available as an NYRB classic). Her previous translations include works by Alexei Nikitin, Maxim Osipov, and Olga Slavnikova.
TOLSTOY, RASPUTIN, OTHERS, AND ME
The Best of Teffi
Edited by
ROBERT CHANDLER and ANNE MARIE JACKSON
Translated from the Russian by
ROBERT and ELIZABETH CHANDLER,
ROSE FRANCE, and ANNE MARIE JACKSON
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Original Russian texts © by Agnès Szydlowski
English translations © 2016 by Rose France except: “My Pseudonym,” “The Gadarene Swine,” “The Merezhkovskys” © 2016 by Anne Marie Jackson; “How I Live and Work,” “Love,” “Ilya Repin” © 2016 by Robert Chandler; “Rasputin,” “My First Tolstoy” © 2014 by Anne Marie Jackson, first published in Subtly Worded (Pushkin Press, 2014).
“Teffi the Fool” © 2016 by Robert Chandler
“A Note on the Texts” © 2016 by Anne Marie Jackson
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Natalia Goncharova, Landscape, Spring, 1926–27; © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris; collection State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Cover design: Katy Homans
An earlier version of Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s English translation of “Love” appeared in Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics, 2005).
Published simultaneously in Great Britain under the title Rasputin and Other Ironies by Pushkin Press, 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tėffi, N. A. (Nadezhda Aleksandrovna), 1872–1952, author. | Chandler, Robert, 1953– translator, editor, writer of preface. | Chandler, Elizabeth, 1947– translator. | France, Rose, translator. | Jackson, Anne Marie, translator, editor.
Title: Tolstoy, Rasputin, others, and me : the best of Teffi / by Teffi ; a new translation from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Rose France, and Anne Marie Jackson ; edited by Robert Chandler and Anne Marie Jackson ; introduction by Robert Chandler.
Other titles: New York Review Books classics.
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2016. | Series: New York Review Books classics | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016004093 (print) | LCCN 2016005272 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590179963 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781590179970 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PG3453.B8 A2 2016 (print) | LCC PG3453.B8 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/42—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016004093
ISBN 978-1-59017-997-0
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction: Teffi the Fool
A Note on the Texts
PART I · How I Live and Work
How I Live and Work
My Pseudonym
My First Visit to an Editorial Office
PART II · Staging Posts
Liza
Love
The Green Devil
Valya
Staging Posts
The White Flower
PART III · Heady Days: Revolutions and Civil War
New Life
Rasputin
We Are Still Living
The Gadarene Swine
PART IV · Artists and Writers Remembered
My First Tolstoy
The Merezhkovskys
Ilya Repin
List of Historical Figures
Acknowledgements
Notes
INTRODUCTION
Teffi the Fool
Teffi was a writer of astonishing, fearless intelligence. There was little, if anything, that she did not see through. No other writer, for example, has evoked the plight of the White refugees from “Sovietdom” as vividly, and with such insight, as Teffi in “The Gadarene Swine”. In this article, probably her penultimate publication on Russian soil, Teffi lets slip her mask of light humorist—and the result is terrifying. “The Gadarene Swine” was published in Odessa in March 1919, just over a month before the Whites evacuated the city, and it was not republished until 2006. It is hard to imagine any émigré journal intrepid enough to republish anything so mercilessly critical of the Whites.
Teffi was secretive and self-protective. She consistently lied about when she was born, shaving thirteen years off her age. She wrote a substantial amount of apparently autobiographical work, but without ever mentioning several of the most important events of her life. She does not tell us that a jealous admirer shot, and nearly killed, one of her lovers. Nor does she mention her second marriage, nor does she ever speak, even obliquely, of the infant son whom she abandoned when she left her husband to return to Petersburg and begin her career as a writer. All this, of course, is entirely understandable. If it
surprises us, it is only because Teffi creates such a powerful illusion, when she writes in the first person, that she is chatting away entirely freely and spontaneously.
Teffi’s most important act of self-protection, however, was her adoption of the mask of a fool. Had she written many articles in the vein of “The Gadarene Swine”, she would have had few friends and few readers. She understood that intelligence as sharp as hers can be frightening, and, like a Shakespearean fool, she found a way to smuggle her insights into the public world without getting herself executed or lynched. She did this with remarkable skill; she was a true juggler, a tumbler. While in Russia, she wrote exclusively for the liberal press yet was the favourite writer of the last tsar—as well as being admired by Lenin. And many of the sketches she published as an émigrée in Paris were reprinted, without her permission, in Soviet Russia. Few Russian writers of the time were able to cross so many boundaries.
Teffi knew what she was about. In “My Pseudonym” she tells us that she chose as her pseudonym the name of a fool whom she knew—because fools are lucky. This was at a time when pseudonyms were used more often than they are today. But as she herself reminds us, other writers chose names with an obvious message—like Maxim Gorky, that is, Maxim the Bitter. Or, like Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova, they chose names with a dramatic ring. No other major writer chose a name as silly as Teffi.
There were times when Teffi seems to have resented that she had come to be seen exclusively as a comic writer. As early as 1916 she was insisting on the tragic element in her work. And yet she may also have felt that, in order to be able to write at all, she had to pretend—to herself as well as to others—that her writing was nothing so very serious. There is a striking similarity between her account, in “My Pseudonym”, of the first night of the very first of her plays to be staged, and her account, in Memories—From Moscow to the Black Sea, of the last time she attended a performance of her own work on Russian soil. Both accounts end with a description of an enthusiastic audience calling for “the author” to take her bow and Teffi being unable, or somehow strangely reluctant, to accept the tribute that was her due. It is as if she felt that she might be unable to write at all if she took herself too seriously, that it was better to pretend that her work simply wrote itself.
Teffi’s mask served her well. She survived the Russian Civil War, the difficulties of life as an émigrée, and the German occupation of France. She lived to be eighty, continuing to write until her last months. But it is time we reassessed her work, without preconceptions. She is always perceptively witty and she wrote thoughtfully about the power of laughter—but she is not the light humorist that Russians and Russianists still sometimes imagine her to be.
In this volume we present not just one other Teffi, but several. Her range of both tone and subject matter is astonishing. She evokes the inner world of children with as much insight as any writer I know. “Love” is a masterpiece of poetic, modernist prose. She wrote poetry throughout her career and, like several of the very greatest Russian prose writers—Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Bunin, Andrei Platonov and Varlam Shalamov among them—she unobtrusively brings to her prose all that she had learnt as a poet. And her portraits of such figures as Lenin and Rasputin are unforgettable.
Robert Chandler
January 2016
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
Teffi’s account of her unplanned emigration from Russia, published in English as Memories—From Moscow to the Black Sea, is often seen as her masterpiece. Gathered here is a selection of her shorter reminiscences, ranging from her childhood in 1870s Russia to the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s.
After she left Russia in 1919, Teffi’s longing for that lost world led her to turn to the past in much of her writing. As she puts it in her 1927 collection, The Small Town (Gorodok):
Our way of life in our ruined Atlantis [. . .] is fading from memory. [. . .] From time to time the sea seems to toss out an unexpected shard, scrap, fragment from this world, this world submerged and lost for evermore, and you begin to examine it with sadness and tenderness, and you remember what the shard used to be like, the whole it was once part of, its role in life—whether to serve, teach, or simply entertain and delight.
And always a shard like this will hook onto your soul and pull it back into the past.
Teffi may also have looked to the past because she felt, as her biographer Edythe Haber describes it, “unable to penetrate the inner life of the French”. In a feuilleton in the émigré newspaper Vozrozhdenie, Teffi wrote that she would never be able to “speak, think and act” on behalf of a French person the way she could on behalf of a Russian.
The first section of this collection, “How I Live and Work”, affords us a few glimpses of Teffi’s life as a writer. The pieces in the second section, “Staging Posts” – mostly written in the 1920s – show us something of Teffi’s personal life, from childhood and adolescence through to motherhood, emigration and life in Paris. “Staging Posts” itself, the most clearly fictionalized of these writings, alludes to a real episode that also figures in Memories, the death of her beloved younger sister Lena; and “The White Flower” evokes Teffi’s first years as an émigrée.
Most of the accounts in the final two sections of this volume—“Heady Days: Revolutions and Civil War” and “Artists and Writers Remembered”—come from My Chronicle, Teffi’s final collection, unpublished during her lifetime. In her preface, Teffi wrote that many interesting people had passed through her life and that her intention was to show them “simply as real people”, since few others were likely to portray them this way. “We Are Still Living” and “The Gadarene Swine” were written at the time of the events they describe. The former dates to 1918, before Teffi had left the city she would always call Petersburg, even though after the outbreak of the First World War it had officially been given the more Slavic name of Petrograd, and the latter to the Russian Civil War, when Teffi was “rolling her way down the map,” along with thousands of others, before leaving Russia forever.
Anne Marie Jackson
January 2016
Part I
HOW I LIVE AND WORK
HOW I LIVE AND WORK
Many people find it surprising that I live somewhere so busy, right opposite Montparnasse station. But it’s what I like. I adore Paris. I like to hear it here beside me—knocking, honking, ringing and breathing. Sometimes, at dawn, a lorry rumbles past beneath my window so loud and so close that it seems to be coming straight through my room, and I draw up my legs in my sleep so they won’t be run over. And then what wakes me an hour or two later is Paris itself—dear, elegant, beautiful Paris. Far better than being woken by some bewhiskered old crone of a concierge, with the eyes of a cockroach.
Many people ask if it’s possible for a small pension to provide one with complete comfort. To which I modestly reply, “Well, I wouldn’t say quite complete.”
Is it this little table you’re looking at? Yes, I know it’s very small, but there’s nothing it doesn’t do. It’s a writing table, a dining table, a dressing table and a sewing table. It’s only three and a half feet across, but on it I have an inkwell, some writing paper, my face powder, some envelopes, my sewing box, a cup of milk, some flowers, a Bible, sweets, manuscripts and some bottles of scent. In layers, like geological strata. The Augean table. Remember how Hercules had to clean the Augean stables? Well, if Augeas’s stables were in such a state, what do you think his writing table would have been like? Probably just like mine. So, how do I write? I put the cup of milk, the Bible and the bottles of scent on the bed, while the sewing box falls of its own accord onto the floor. I need to keep everything essential close at hand—and anyway there’s nowhere else to put anything. Though I suppose the flowers could go into the cupboard.
The Bible takes up a quarter of the table, but I need it because Professor Vysheslavtsev, whose outstanding lectures I attend on Mondays (and I recommend everyone else to do the same), often refers to the Epistles of Paul.
&
nbsp; So I need to consult the Bible.
Sometimes there are landslides on my table. Everything slips sideways and hangs over the edge. And then it takes only the slightest disturbance of the air (mountaineers will know what I mean); it takes only the opening of a window or the postman knocking at the door—and an entire avalanche roars and crashes to the floor. Sometimes I then discover long-lost items—things I’ve replaced long ago: gloves; a volume of Proust; a theatre ticket from last summer; an unsent letter (and there I was, impatiently waiting for an answer!); a flower from a ball gown . . . Sometimes this excites a kind of scientific interest in me, as if I were a palaeontologist who has happened upon the bone of a mammoth. To which era should I assign this glove or page of manuscript?
Worst of all are flowers; if there’s a landslide, they create a flood. If someone gives me flowers, they are always taken aback by my look of sudden anxiety.
As for domestic animals, I have only a bead snake and a small monster—a varnished cedar cone standing on little paws. It brings me luck.
While we’re on the theme of domesticity and creature comforts, I did also once have a venetian blind. But there wasn’t room for it in the room; it had to go. If I’d hung on to it, it could have created mayhem.
I’m not planning to write anything at all big. I think you’ll understand why.
We must wait for a big table. And if we wait in vain—tant pis.[1]
1926
Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler
MY PSEUDONYM
I’m often asked about the origin of my pseudonym: “Teffi”. Why Teffi? It sounds like something you’d call a dog. And a great many readers of the Russian Word have indeed given this name to their fox terriers and Italian greyhounds.