by Teffi
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.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I. RUSSIAN TEXTS:
“How I Live and Work” was published in the illustrated magazine Illyustrirovannaya Rossiya (Paris), 27th February 1926; never republished since.
“My Pseudonym” was first published in the newspaper Vozrozhdenie (Paris), 20th December 1931. Republished in Moya Letopis’.
“My First Visit to an Editorial Office” was first published in the journal Segodnya (Riga), 29th September 1929; included in the collection of memoirs Moya Letopis’ (Moscow: Vagrius, 2004).
“Liza” was first published in the short story collection Gorodok, (Paris, 1927); reprinted in Izbrannye proizvedeniya (Moscow: Lakom, 1999), vol. 3.
“Love” was first published in Illyustrirovannaya Rossiya, 15th November 1924, then in Gorodok; reprinted in Izbrannye proizvedeniya, vol. 3.
“The Green Devil” was first published in Segodnya (Riga), 25th December 1925, then in Gorodok; reprinted in Izbrannye proizvedeniya, vol. 3.
“Valya” was first published in Vozrozhdenie (Paris), 7th January 1926, then in Gorodok; reprinted in Izbrannye proizvedeniya, vol. 3.
“Staging Posts” was first published in Poslednie novosti (Paris), 28th April 1940, then in Zemnaya Raduga (New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1952); reprinted in Izbrannye proizvedeniya, vol. 3.
“The White Flower” was first published in Zveno (Paris), 3rd March 1924, then in Gorodok; reprinted in Izbrannye proizvedeniya, vol. 3.
“New Life”: The first part, up to “And so I began waiting for Lenin”, was published in the newspaper Novoe russkoe slovo (New York), 25th June 1950, under the title “45 Years”. The entire article was later republished in Vozrozhdenie (Paris), January and February 1956, nos. 49 and 50. Teffi almost certainly intended this as a single article, titled “New Life”, though recent Russian editions, including Moya Letopis’, still publish it as two separate articles: “45 Years” and “New Life”. Reprinted in Moya Letopis’.
“Rasputin” was first published in Segodnya on 10th, 13th and 14th August 1924, then in Vospominaniya (Paris, 1932); reprinted in Moya Letopis’.
“We Are Still Living” may not have been published in Teffi’s lifetime. Included in Kontrrevolyutsionnaya bukva (St Petersburg: Azbuka, 2006) and Teffi v strane vospominanii (Kiev: LP Media, 2011).
“The Gadarene Swine” was first published in Gryadushchy Den’ (Odessa), March 1919; reprinted in Kontrrevolyutsionnaya bukva and Teffi v strane vospominanii.
“My First Tolstoy” was first published in Poslednie novosti (Paris), 21st November 1920.
“The Merezhkovskys” was first published in Novoe russkoe slovo (New York), 29 January 1950; reprinted in Moya Letopis’.
“Ilya Repin” was first published in Moya Letopis’ from a manuscript in RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art).
II.
III.
Thank you to the following, who have all either helped check the English texts or answer questions about the original:
Tamara Alexandrova, Maria Bloshteyn, Ilona Chavasse, Olive Classe, Jane Costlow, Kathryn Davies, Boris Dralyuk, Alexandra Fleming, Paul Gallagher, Anna Gunin, Anne Gutt, Edythe Haber, Nicky Harman, Rosalind Harvey, Sara Jolly, Elena Malysheva, Steve Marder, Melanie Mauthner, Olga Meerson, Melanie Moore, Alexander Nakhimovsky, Natasha Perova, Anna Pilkington, Joseph Prestwich, Donald Rayfield, Richard Shaw, Yevgeny Slivkin, Irina Steinberg, Elena Trubilova, Elena Volkova, Maria Wiltshire, Christine Worobec, and many other members of two invaluable mail groups—the Emerging Translators’ Network and SEELANGS.
NOTES
HOW I LIVE AND WORK
1. A common French idiom. Here, the sense is “Well, that’s just too bad.”
MY PSEUDONYM
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).
MY FIRST VISIT TO AN EDITORIAL OFFICE
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.
LIZA
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.
LOVE
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.
THE GREEN DEVIL
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.
VALYA
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.
STAGING POSTS
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.
THE WHITE FLOWER
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.
NEW LIFE
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.