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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
An enthralling, elegant, emotional account of a journey into exile, by the wonderful Teffi Moscow, 1918. Following the Revolution, people are leaving the city in droves - bound for the Black Sea, and from there to Europe and beyond. In late autumn, the celebrated writer Teffi is invited on a reading tour; having elegantly navigated the bureaucratic waters for her visa, she spends the winter travelling from Moscow to Kiev, and from there to Odessa and on to Novorossisk, first by train and then by ship. On the shores of the Black Sea, as Spring arrives, Teffi is advised to go abroad for a time, until things have settled down in Russia. She reluctantly agrees, not fully realising that this would be the beginning of her permanent exile from her beloved country. The great Teffi's memoir of her last months in Russia is, for all its melancholy, marked by her characteristic wit, sense of irony and generosity of spirit. Her descriptions of her journey across two thousand miles of Russia, during which she encounters illness, hardship and sorrow in the company of a multitude of refugees, are almost unbearably moving at times - but also irresistibly vivid, and utterly unforgettable. Teffi (1872-1952) wrote poems, plays, stories, satires and feuilletons, and was renowned in Russia for her wit and powers of observation. Following her emigration in 1919 she settled in Paris, where she became a leading figure in the ŽmigrŽ literary scene. Now her genius has been rediscovered by a new generation of readers, and she once again enjoys huge acclaim in Russia and across the world. Her short-story collection Subtly Worded is also published by Pushkin Press, and the non-fiction collection Rasputin and Other Ironies will also be published in May 2016.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
BEFORE A MAP OF RUSSIA
In a strange house, in a faraway land,
her portrait hangs on the wall;
she herself is dying like a beggar woman,
lying on straw, in pain that can’t be told.
But here she looks as she always did look:
young, rich, and draped
in that luxurious green cloak
in which she was always portrayed.
I gaze at your countenance as if at an icon…
“Blessed be your name, slaughtered Rus!”
I quietly touch your cloak with one hand;
and with that same hand make the sign of the cross.
TEFFI
translated by
Robert Chandler
Introduction
Teffi, commenting in 1918 on the savage civil war that was decimating the Russian Empire in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution, put the blame squarely on the devil. Russia had improbably held together for so many centuries, she wrote:
But suddenly some wily devil poked his stick somewhere near Moscow and began spinning Russia like a whirlwind top. “Whee-ee-ee!” The pieces are flying in various directions like sparks. The Crimea! The Caucasus! Poland! Little Russia! Lithuania! Finland! The Baltic region! Siberia! Kazan! Whee-ee-ee! More! More! Cities! Seas! Kingdoms! Principalities! Free lands! More! More! Soon only the stick will remain…1
Teffi was at the time one of the most widely read and beloved of Russia’s writers. As one émigré commenter asserted: “There was scarcely ever another writer in Russia who had such an enormous circle of readers as Teffi.” He added that, although she published almost exclusively in the liberal press, “both Russias” read her and she was a favourite of the last tsar, Nikolai II2 (as she was of his Bolshevik successor, Vladimir Lenin). Her celebrity reached such heights that there even existed Teffi Perfume and Teffi Candies.
Teffi (pseudonym of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya) was born in 1872 into a distinguished St. Petersburg family. Her father, Alexander Lokhvitsky, was a professor of law and much published writer both in the academic and popular press, who, after the legal reforms of Tsar Alexander II in the 1860s, became a celebrated criminal lawyer. Teffi noted that he was “renowned for his wit”—a gift inherited by his daughter.3 The second youngest of six children (five girls and one boy), she recalled that all her siblings wrote poetry4—and no less than four of the sisters became professional writers. One of them, Mirra Lokhvitskaya, achieved renown as a poet before her early death in 1905. Known as the Russian Sappho, she introduced unbridled female sexuality into Russian poetry and had close ties to the decadents and Symbolists. The only boy, Nikolai, pursued a military career and during World War I led the Russian expeditionary force to France, rising to the rank of lieutenant general.
Teffi’s own writing career was delayed by her short and unhappy marriage to Wladyslav Buczynski, a Polish graduate of the St. Petersburg Law School and a landowner. They wed around 1890 and separated less than a decade later when Teffi abandoned her family at her husband’s estate in the Mogilev Province (now in Belarus) and returned to St. Petersburg to pursue her literary calling. In 1901 her first publication—a serious poem that she herself judged “dreadful”—appeared under her maiden name, N. Lokhvitskaya.5 After publishing two more unexceptionable lyrical poems, at the end of 1901 her first satirical verses came out and for the first time she adopted the pseudonym Teffi.6 For the next couple of years she signed her serious work with her real name—usually her married name, N. Buchinskaya—and her humorous pieces Teffi, but by 1904 she used her pseudonym exclusively.
By 1903 Teffi was reaching a broader audience, her feuilletons, stories, and verse (both satiric and serious) appearing regularly in the popular Petersburg newspaper, Birzhevye vedomosti (The Stock Exchange Gazette), as well as in other broad circulation newspapers and magazines. In 1907 her activities spread to the theatre when her one-act play, The Woman Question, was successfully staged at St. Petersburg’s Suvorin Theatre.7 It was followed by many more theatrical miniatures, which enjoyed great popularity over the next decade in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and throughout the Russian Empire. In addition, Teffi’s talents extended to music. She wrote many songs—sometimes both words and music, at other times only the lyrics. These she sang to the accompaniment of her guitar (which she tenderly eulogizes in Memories) and many became part of the repertoire of well-known performers.
It has been said that Teffi invented her own genre—“the feuilleton that got by without politics”8—but this was not always the case. She, like many writers and intellectuals, actively supported the 1905 Revolution and she had quite close ties to the Bolsheviks. In March 1905, her poem “Banner of Freedom” (later entitled “The Bees”) came out in the Geneva Bolshevik newspaper, Vpered (Forward).9 In October, after the tsar issued his manifesto guaranteeing certain civil liberties including freedom of the press, Teffi wrote for the first legal Bolshevik newspaper allowed in Russia, Novaia zhizn’ (New Life). The newspaper’s literary contributors included a diverse collection of contemporary writers, ranging from the Symbolist Konstantin Balmont, to the realist Ivan Bunin, to the revolutionary Maksim Gorky, but Teffi was more deeply involved than most. She served as one of three non-Party members on the editorial board, who all, according to one of the Bolshevik participants, “made themselves out at the time to be Marxists or Marxist-leaning [marksistvuiushchikh].”10
In the first issue of Novaia zhizn’, Teffi’s sketch, “October 18,” vividly depicts—using visual iconography common in revolutionary art—the masses united in a “mighty and triumphant procession,” their red banners outlined against the sky “like gigantic dark streams of resurrected triumphant blood.”11 She pictures the unity of all classes: “A soldier, a lady in white gloves, a worker, an officer,” etc., and at the end returns to the banners, which “lead their people, their great host, forward, through the black night, to a new dawn, to a new life.” Teffi published several more pieces in Novaia zhizn’, but relations between the literary staff and the Bolsheviks, strained from the start, became worse when Lenin arrived from exile in November 1905. Finally, when Novaia zhizn’ became no more than a Party organ, the entire literary section, including Teffi, resigned. This negative experience left a permanent mark, and accounts for her hostility toward the Bolsheviks—and Lenin in particular—in 1917.12
Between 1906 and 1908 Teffi’s political satire continued to appear in other opposition periodicals, but with time it grew milder, due in part to greater government restrictions, but also, no doubt, to fading revolutionary fervour. Russia was tired of all that solemnity, she wrote in 1910, and was longing for laughter:
Laughter is now in style […] Books of humour go through three editions in three or four months and demand for them keeps rising. Humour magazines are alluded to even in speeches delivered under the bell of the State Duma. Theatrical entrepreneurs are longing for a good merry comedy and beg tearfully, “Why, write something, the kind of thing that makes your throat begin to tickle with laughter!”13
The demand for laughter coincided perfectly with Teffi’s special gift, and it accounts for the renown she achieved during her final decade in Russia. The first print organ that spread her fame was Satirikon (Satyricon), the best Russian humour magazine of the early twentieth century, conceived of in 1908 by Arkady Averchenko (who in Memories is Teffi’s travelling companion from Moscow to Kiev). With its very talented staff of writers and artists, Satirikon was a resounding success, and Teffi and Averchenko became its most celebrated writers. Her popularity grew still greater in 1909 when she became a feuilletonist for the Moscow-based Russkoe slovo (Russian Word), the most widely read and highly regarded newspaper in Russia, whose circulation reached over a million by 1917. Her Sunday columns—which included both topical feuilletons and stories—appeared in Russkoe slovo until it was closed by the Bolsheviks in 1917.
Teffi published her first books in 1910, and they reflect the two sides of her talent. The first, Seven Fires, is a volume of poetry plus a play written in orientalized prose; the second was entitled Humorous Stories.14 The poetry received mixed reviews, but the stories were universally praised by critics, both in the elite and popular press. Mikhail Kuzmin, in his review in the prestigious Apollon (Apollo), favourably contrasted Teffi’s natural Russian humour in the Chekhov manner to the “fantastic lack of verisimilitude” of Averchenko’s “American” variety.15 Teffi published no more books of poetry in Russia, but Humorous Stories was followed almost yearly by new prose collections, all of which were published in multiple editions and highly praised by critics, who often deemed Teffi the best humorous writer of the time. Typical are a reviewer’s comments on her 1914 collection, Smoke without Fire; asserting that Teffi “undoubtedly occupies first place” among contemporary humorists, he declared her humour “purely Russian, sly and good-natured,” and concluded: “Teffi’s style is refined and simple, the dialogue—her favourite form—is lively and unforced; the action unfolds quickly, without superfluous details, and sincere merriment is effortlessly conveyed to the reader.”16 Some critics noted the sadness intermingled with Teffi’s comedy, her “almost elegiac humour” depicting “grey, everyday life…”17 Her more sombre side is reflected particularly in The Lifeless Beast (1915), her best collection of the teens, in which the serious mood predominates. Teffi’s position as a woman writer—and more unusually, a woman humorist—aroused contradictory responses. One critic found “something typically feminine in that observant mockery with which she illuminates every trifle of everyday life,” whereas her fellow Satyriconian, Arkady Bukhov, distinguished her from the usual run of despised women writers: “In general Teffi writes so cleverly and beautifully that even her enemies would not call her a woman writer.”18
During the revolutionary year of 1917, political events began again to figure centrally in Teffi’s stories and feuilletons. Exultation over the February Revolution and the overthrow of the monarchy is reflected in the story “The Average Man,” whose title character is now able to shout fearlessly “the policeman is a fool.” He explains to his wife: “I felt like it and I screamed. That’s the way I am. I! The free citizen Gerasim Ivanych Shchurkin.”19 Such optimism was not to last long, however, in part because of the Provisional Government’s inability to implement its liberal program during wartime, but, on a more fundamental level, because Teffi’s dream of class unity, expressed in 1905, was clearly unrealizable. In a June 1917 feuilleton titled “Deserters,” she criticized the intelligentsia for their anxiety over the violent unrest among the peasantry. She accused them of expecting a miracle—that “the same people [narod] who for centuries were stupefied with vodka, oppressed, crushed by lack of rights, by illiteracy, poverty, superstition, and hunger,” would at once reveal “a great and shining soul…”20 Acknowledging the outrages, she nevertheless branded as “deserters” those who wished to avoid “participation in the difficult and great exploit of building a new life.” Even if their worst fears prove to be justified, she concludes, “and instead of a triumphal chariot only black corpses will be driven along our great path, may each one of us be able to say: ‘My forces were weak and small, but I gave of them totally. And I did not renounce and did not flee. I was not a deserter!’”21
Teffi’s revolutionary sympathies, however, emphatically did not extend to the Bolsheviks. Her disdain for Lenin and his party, which dated back to 1905, is expressed powerfully in a feuilleton of late June 1917, in which she gave a withering portrait of Lenin: “Average height, grey complexion, completely ‘ordinary.’ Only his forehead is not good, very prominent, stubborn, heavy, not inspired, not seeking, not creative…” The “sincere and honest preacher of the great religion of socialism” (as she rather surprisingly calls him) lacks “the fiery tongue of the gift of the Holy Spirit…, there is no inspiration in him, no flight, and no fire.”22 For Lenin’s followers she expressed unadulterated contempt, but at once makes clear that she has not rejected socialism as such: “Leninists, Bolsheviks, anarchists and communists, thugs, registered housebreakers—what a muddle! What a Satanic vinaigrette! What immense work—to raise once more and cleanse from all this garbage the great idea of socialism!”
Teffi criticized the Bolsheviks for their inability to correctly judge the movement of history, but revealed a stunning lack of foresight when she asked rhetorically: “Is not the word ‘Bolshevik’ now discredited forever and irrevocably?” For only a few months later, on the night of October 24–25, they carried out their bloodless coup in Petrograd. In their effort to solidify their position, the Bolsheviks quickly acted to stifle the opposition press, shutting down Russkoe slovo and other unfriendly periodicals in late November 1917. The staff writers, including Teffi, did not succumb easily, however, for in January 1918, they opened another newspaper, which they called Novoe slovo (New Word). When it was closed on April 2, the determined journalists opened yet another newspaper, Nashe slovo (Our Word) on April 11, which lasted until July 6. Satirikon (now Novyi Satirikon, New Satirikon) eked out its existence until August 1918, with Teffi’s works appearing to the very end.
Life in Petrograd grew intolerable, both materially and morally, during the months following the October Revolution. Aside from a pervasive atmosphere of fear among the Bolsheviks’ political and class enemies, during the bitterly cold winter of 1917–18 the city was suffering from severe shortages of food and fuel. By March 1918, things had reached such a pass that Teffi declared Petrograd dead: “We live in a dead city… On the streets are the corpses of horses, dogs, and quite frequently of people… At night dark, frightened figures steal up to the horse corpses and carve out a piece of meat.”23 She writes of arrests: “Someone released from a Petrograd prison tells about executions… Nobody knows anything for certain, but in the dead city they are always talking about death and always believe in it.”24 In a piece written in Kiev the following October, Teffi quotes a typical conversation between two Petrograd acquaintances:
“He’s arrested, arrested. It’s not known where…”
“They’ve been executed, both of them…”
“It’s said they were tortured… shhh… Somebody’s listening in.” And suddenly his face adopts an unnatural, carefree expression and his trembling lips whistle “Pretty Girls of the Cabaret.”25
In May 1918, Teffi left hungry Petrograd for Moscow; the theatre magazine Rampa i zhizn’ (Footlights and Life) noted her delight with “Moscow bread.”26 She probably came to Moscow that spring to attend rehearsals of Catherine the Great, an operetta she co-wrote with the comic poet Lolo (L.G. Munshtein, c. 1866–1947), which opened with great success in August. Another and more urgent reason for her departure from Petrograd, however, might have been a troubling incident that took place at the very beginning of 1918: An actress was arrested after a New Year’s Day performance of works by Teffi and Averchenko, and only after a lengthy interrogation and a warning that “she must not dare to earn her bread through slander of the people’s government,” was she let go.27 (In Memories Teffi reimagines this incident, also moving it to a later date.)
By September 1918, life in Moscow was also growing more dangerous. In contrast to Petersburg, as Teffi later wrote from Kiev, Moscow was “still alive,” although just barely: “Mad motorcars race, with a whistle and a whoop. Rifle shots enliven the black silence of nocturnal streets. Moscow is being robbed and stabbed. It is still alive, still protesting, jerking its legs and pressing a foreign passport to its heart.”28 This was the situation confronting Teffi at the beginning of Memories.
In the title piece to Teffi’s 1927 book, The Small Town (the title referring to the Russian colony within the larger Parisian metropolis), she expresses her disdain for émigré memoir writers. Aside from the usual categories of men and women, she writes, the town’s population includes “ministers and generals,” who spend their time amassing debts and writing memoirs.29 “The memoirs,” she adds, “were written to glorify their own name and to disgrace their comrades in arms. The difference among the memoirs consisted in the fact that some were written by hand and others on a typewriter.”30
In the note that introduces her own Memories, Teffi signals at once that she has written a very different kind of book—one in which there are no heroes, no specific political line, no lofty conclusions. Her subjects instead are “ordinary unhistorical people who struck her as amusing or interesting.”31 The word “amusing” might at first seem jarring, given her grim subject matter, but in Teffi’s view the funny and the tragic are not mutually exclusive. She writes in Memories, in a remark that could characterize her comic vision as a whole: “But life in Odessa soon began to pall. A joke is not so funny when you’re living inside it. It begins to seem more like a tragedy.” A number of critics noted that the humour only accentuated the horror. Mikhail Tsetlin, for example, wrote: “The laughter and bitterness in Teffi’s book are so funny, and thereby it [the book] achieves a double impression: what nonsense and what sadness and what horror!”32
The author of Memories indeed makes no claim of heroism, warns us that she does not consider herself any more interesting than the others. For the most part Teffi portrays herself (as she often does in her writings) as a quite ordinary woman—frivolous, of limited understanding, guided more by emotions and naïve ideals than by abstract principles. But when need be she drops the mask, and the reader views events through her penetrating gaze. The closest thing to a hero in Teffi’s dark comedy is the unlikely figure of “pseudonym Gooskin,” her “impresario,” who persuaded her to leave Moscow for a time and go on a reading tour of still Bolshevik-free Ukraine. An Odessan Jew whose non-sequiturs and mangling of the Russian language are a constant source of humour, Gooskin bears none of the external attributes of the hero, but during the treacherous trip from Moscow through the lawless western reaches of Russia it is his wiliness—his ability to outsmart the antagonist and lay low if necessary—that saves Teffi and her companions time and again.
Teffi parts ways with Gooskin in Kiev, and the remainder of the book traces her path down the map of the former Russian Empire, with stops in Odessa, Novorossiisk, Yekaterinodar. Everywhere she went she witnessed a similar dynamic: refugees like herself trying to rebuild cultural and social structures destroyed by revolution only to find them once again toppled by the forces of civil war. In Kiev, still occupied by the Germans in accordance with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Teffi encountered many literary and theatrical colleagues who, like herself, had fled from Bolshevik Russia and were now trying feverishly to start up theatres, newspapers, and other cultural institutions. At first it seemed like a “festival,” she writes, but the second impression was of “a station waiting room, just before the final whistle.” When the Germans, defeated in the World War, left in December 1918, and, after the brief rule of Ukrainian nationalists, the Bolsheviks began their approach in January 1919, the refugees fled further.
Many went to Odessa—Teffi among them. The new arrivals resumed their feverish social life, gambling and drinking through the night, while the eternally optimistic writers and journalists again set about starting a newspaper. The forces of destruction, however—at first taking the form of the notorious Odessan gangsters (made famous by Isaac Babel)—were never far below the surface. And when in April the Bolsheviks began their incursion, people resumed their exodus, Teffi barely escaping on a rickety ship, the Shilka, on which she hoped to sail to Vladivostok and from there to return home.
While on the ship Teffi witnessed the dissolution of her old world on a more individual level. A furnace stoker with whom she struck up a conversation on the deck one night revealed that he was in disguise—that he was actually a Petersburg youth who had visited her apartment, where they “talked about stones, about a yellow sapphire.” Since then his entire family had perished and now he planned to go to Odessa to fight the Bolsheviks. Teffi remembers the evenings in Petersburg: “Languid, high-strung ladies, sophisticated young men. A table adorned with white lilac. A conversation about a yellow sapphire…” Then she imagines the execution awaiting this boy, who will “rest his weary shoulders against the stone wall of a black cellar and close his eyes…” If the stoker marks the demise of the aestheticized pre-revolutionary artistic world, a group of young officers who boarded the Shilka in the Crimean city of Sevastopol embodies the disappearance of the aristocratic military culture: “They were handsome and smart and they chatted away merrily, casually coming out with the odd word of French and singing French songs with perfect accents.” Yet they were soon to be mowed down in battle, Teffi remarks, “to meet their death with courage and grace.”
After the Shilka docked in the large port city of Novorossiisk, Teffi was invited to attend a performance of her works in Yekaterinodar, a last bastion of imperial pomp. On the train there she shared a car with “haggard” and “worn-out” soldiers and officers, who—in stark contrast to the jolly officers on the Shilka—bared the true, horrifying face of war. One of them told the story of a colonel who, after witnessing the torture of his wife and children, wreaked revenge on captured Bolsheviks time and again: “He would sit on the porch drinking tea and have the prisoners strung up in front of him, first one, then another, then another. While he carried on drinking tea.” Another soldier declared him “insane,” but his companion demurred, insisting that “In his world, in the world he lives in, he’s perfectly normal.” Within the bestial conditions of war, the usual rules governing human behaviour have been suspended. Although Teffi is obviously more sympathetic to the Whites, she shows both sides caught in the horror. Whether it is the female “commissar H” at the Russian border town (also “deranged”), who “sits on her porch, sentencing and shooting,” or the crazed White colonel, the basest instincts have conquered these people. Later that night the voice of a soldier, in combat since the beginning of the World War, summed up the horror: “I can’t go on anymore. Since 1914 they’ve been torturing me, torturing me, and now… now I’m dead. I’m dead…”
The contrast between these living corpses and the military elite Teffi then encountered at a theatre in Yekaterinodar could hardly be greater. After the dark vision of the fighting men, the generals and ministers seemed to be living a masquerade. The glitter was on full display: “Gold and silver lace, the glint of uniforms—true splendour.” At the end of the performance, the author came out for a bow, Teffi commenting ruefully: “My last bow to a Russian audience on Russian soil.” This gathering was also, in a sense, a “last bow” for the tsarist elite, soon to vanish forever from Russia.
Teffi conjures up a final, chilling image that encapsulates the annihilation of her old bohemian world, with its love of pose, of playing with life. As her train approached the Caucasus resort of Kislovodsk, she spied within the idyllic landscape “a scrap of rope. It is a gallows.” She notes that it was there that they hanged “Ksenya G, the famous anarchist,” whom she remembers: “Bold, gay, young, beautiful—always chic,” one of an anarchist group whom everyone considered to be “fakes and braggarts. Not one of us had taken them seriously.” But revolution played its tragic trick on Ksenya G and killed her in good earnest: She “had stood here, in this very spot, smoking her last cigarette and screwing her eyes up as she looked at her last sun. Then she had flicked away the cigarette butt—and calmly thrown the stiff noose around her neck.”
Counterpoised to such visions of death and destruction, Teffi depicts too those who managed to survive the whirlwind of revolution more or less morally intact. A characteristic typical of Teffi’s comic, anti-heroic world, and one that allowed some to endure, is a kind of lighthearted adaptability. Thus, there are the “elegant young men in smart suits” on the Shilka who, although they at first treat the demand that they haul coal as a joke, soon begin “entering into their new role”—not only carrying the coal, but adopting the stevedores’ language and songs. They have, to be sure, only replaced one role with another, but that adaptability would prove essential for future émigrés, compelled again and again to reinvent themselves.
In general, though, women are the best survivors—not because of unusual valour or nobility, and certainly not because of political principles, but because of their ability to maintain such outward appearances as are necessary for human life, while at the same time adapting to shifting circumstances. With a combination of irony and affection, Teffi describes women running to the hairdresser or buying the last pair of shoes before their lives fall apart. “O sweet and eternal femininity!” the narrator exclaims, comparing such women to edelweiss in a snowy wasteland. She tells of meeting one cheerful soul on a street in Novorossiisk who asks her to admire her dress made of “remarkably nasty muslin.” The woman explains that it is made of “medical gauze,” which, although not very strong, is “cheap, and it comes nice and wide.” Teffi imagines that even “during Pompeii’s last minutes, there had been edelweisses hurrying to fit in a quick pedicure.”
A similar ability on a more serious level of necessity is manifested by a group of Armenian refugees camped out in tents along the Novorossiisk shore. They have been there for a long time and have suffered from all kinds of hardships, and yet they have adjusted to this life: They visit one another, argue, the children play music and dance. Teffi describes a woman who, judging from her torn silk dress, must have been rich but is now delighted because she has found a way to cover her tent with a shawl. Everything is relative, Teffi concludes. Those who can adapt, who can maintain life’s forms even in the face of hardship, can survive. In her émigré stories it is typically the women who have learned this lesson well, who hold the family together while their husbands lie on the sofa, immersed in dreams of the past or in unrealizable schemes for the future.
During Teffi’s stay in Novorossiisk there was a fierce windstorm (nord-ost), which becomes emblematic of all the destructive forces of nature that have crushed the refugees’ lives, be it illness (the typhus epidemic then rampant in the city, the Spanish flu that Teffi barely survived in Kiev); the ferocious waves driving the Shilka passengers they knew not where; the internecine conflict itself, which, like a whirlwind, blew people “this way and that way, left and right, over the mountains or into the sea. Soulless and mindless, with the cruelty of an elemental force, this whirlwind determined our fate.” People caught up in this whirlwind were no longer in control, Teffi writes, their movements and their ultimate destination often determined not by their conscious intent, but by chance. This was true of Teffi herself, whose plan to return to St. Petersburg from Vladivostok was thwarted when the Shilka was declared unseaworthy. People persuaded her to go abroad for the time being and to return to Russia in the spring. She thought: “‘Spring,’ ‘motherland’—what wonderful words…” But not only did she not return in the spring—she was destined to live out her long life in exile.
After a period in Constantinople, Teffi reached Paris at the end of 1919 and, except for a short period in Germany in the early 1920s, lived in France until her death in 1952. Her weekly feuilletons and stories, published primarily in Paris émigré newspapers, as well as her many books, reestablished within the narrower circle of Russians abroad the immense popularity she had enjoyed in Russia. In her works she chronicled with her characteristic combination of humour and pathos—and at times with sharp, witty satire—everyday life in emigration. During her long decades in exile Teffi suffered the woes common among the Russian émigrés, especially of her ageing generation—financial need, serious illness, lack of acceptance in her adopted country, and permanent separation from her beloved homeland, to which she could return only in her vivid, amusing stories. There she looked back to Russia of the past with nostalgia and affection, but almost never with easy sentimentality—in fact, sometimes with quite the opposite emotion.
In her 1947 essay, “Baba Yaga,” for example, Teffi treats as an inherent feature of the Russian character a violent drive to destruction not so very different from the elemental force that aroused such dread in Memories.33 Her subject, Baba Yaga—the “terrible witch” from Russian folklore—is commonly considered to be the Russian “goddess of whirlwinds and snowstorms,” Teffi writes, and she at first laments that, unlike the beautiful Venus and Diana, the Russian goddess is such a “hideous, vicious old woman.” At the end, however, she evokes the lure of Baba Yaga’s destructive might. When she overturns the sleigh of a winter traveller on his way to see his sweet Mashenka, he is enchanted by the “free and wonderful… song of the blizzard.” The home and hearth promised by Mashenka mean nothing to him now: “Can he even remember her?… He feels both terrified and full of joy, and his soul sings and laughs. For never, never has it known such ecstasy.” He cries to Baba Yaga: “You are a GODDESS. Take me into your death—it is better than life.”
This celebration of the same elemental destructiveness so lamented in Teffi’s Memories is unnerving, but it is telling that not long before she wrote “Baba Yaga,” she touched upon an atrocity even greater than the Russian civil war—one that had only just been perpetrated by a “civilized” Western European country, Germany. In 1945, after seeing a film showing the Majdanek concentration camp, Teffi expressed particular horror at the orderliness of the Nazis’ annihilation machine—the “rectangular little houses at a correct distance from one another” with “a big factory chimney”—the crematorium—protruding in their midst.34 The fact that this “regular, clean little picture” was “thought up by man, created by human will” made it even “more horrifying than the heaps of skeletons.” The latter, after all, have been seen before “on battlefields or in countries swept by the cyclone of revolution,” but in such cases “chaos is the essential form, it cries out [that you are] stepping over the edge, over the brink of order, of common humanity.” And so the Nazis’ rationalization of evil and death makes even the chaos of the Russian civil war seem not as terrible.
—Edythe Haber
MEMORIES
The author considers it necessary to warn readers that in Memories they will not find famous historical figures or the deeply significant words such figures were said to have uttered. Nor will they find any elucidations and conclusions or refutations of this or that party line. They will find only a simple and truthful account of the author’s involuntary journey across the entire expanse of Russia—a journey she made along with millions of other ordinary people.
And readers will find in these pages, with very few exceptions, only ordinary unhistorical people who struck her as amusing or interesting, and incidents and adventures that seemed entertaining; and if the author has to speak of herself, this is not because she believes she is of interest to the reader, but only because she took part in the incidents described and absorbed the impressions made by these people and these events—and the removal of this axis, this living soul, would make the whole story go dead.
1
Moscow. Autumn. Cold.
My Petersburg life has been liquidated. The Russian Word has been closed down.1 There is, it seems, no possibility of anything.
Or rather, there is one possibility; it appears, day after day, in the shape of a squint-eyed Odessa impresario by the name of Gooskin, who is trying to persuade me to go with him to Kiev and Odessa and give public readings there.
“Had any bread today?” is how he begins, in a tone of foreboding. “Well, tomorrow you won’t. Everyone who can is going to the Ukraine. Only no one can. But you… You’ll be going there by train. I’ll be paying you sixty percent of gross takings. I’ve already telegraphed the Hotel London to reserve you the best suite. The sun will be shining, you’ll be beside the sea, you’ll read people one or two of your stories… You’ll take the money, buy yourself some ham and some butter—and then you’ll be sitting there in a café, eating away to your heart’s content. What’s to lose? Everyone knows me—just ask your friends. My pseudonym is Gooskin. I could tell you my real surname too, but it’s terribly long and difficult. For the love of God, let’s go! The best suite in the International!”
“But you said the Hotel London!”
“All right then, the London. Do you have something against the International?”
I ask around for advice. There truly are a lot of people desperate to get to the Ukraine.
“This pseudonymous Gooskin of mine,” I demur. “There’s something odd about him.”
“What do you mean?” people of experience reply. “He’s no odder than any of the others. They’re all the same, these petty impresarios.”
It’s Averchenko who puts an end to my doubts.2 It turns out that he’s being taken to Kiev by some other pseudonym. He too is going to give public readings. We decide to go together. Averchenko’s pseudonym is also taking along two actresses, to perform short sketches.
“You see!” says Gooskin triumphantly. “Now all you need do is apply for your permits and everything will go swimmingly—like a knife through bread and butter.”
I have to say that I hate all kinds of public appearances. Why, I don’t know. It’s a quirk of mine. And as for this pseudonymous Gooskin with all his talk of percentages, or, as he himself puts it, “precentages”… But everyone around me is saying, “You’re so lucky, you’re going!” Or “Lucky thing, in Kiev they have pastries filled with cream!” Or even just “Lucky thing… with cream!”
It seems clearer and clearer that I have to go. Everyone wants to leave. And if someone isn’t struggling to obtain the necessary permits, since they know they’ve got no hope of success, this doesn’t stop them from dreaming. While those who remain hopeful are suddenly discovering that they have Ukrainian blood, Ukrainian connections, and ties of every kind.
“My third cousin had a house in Poltava!”
“And my surname, strictly speaking, isn’t Nefedin, but Nekhvedin—from Khvedko, which is a Ukrainian root.”
“There’s nothing I love more than fatback and onion!”3
“Popova’s already in Kiev. So are the Ruchkins, the Melzons, the Kokins, the Pupins, the Fiks, and the Shpruks.4 Everyone’s already in Kiev.”
And then Gooskin begins to prove his worth:
“Tomorrow at three I’ll be bringing you a commissar—the most terrible commissar of all from the frontiermost station of all. A wild beast of a commissar. He’s just stripped the whole of the Bat. Stripped them bare—didn’t leave them a thing.”5
“But if they even strip bats, what hope have we got of slipping through?”
“That’s why I’m asking him round. Just say a few pleasantries to him and ask for a permit. And then in the evening I’ll take him to the theatre.”
And so I begin the application procedures. First in some institution to do with theatrical matters. A languid lady with a Cléo de Mérode hairdo6 adorned with a shabby copper band and liberally sprinkled with dandruff grants me permission to go on a reading tour.
Then long, long hours in an endless line in some place that’s like a cross between an army barrack and a large prison. Finally a soldier with a bayonet takes my document from me and goes off to show it to his superior. Then a door is flung open—and out comes the superior himself. Who he is I don’t know. I can only say that, in the language of the time, he is “draped in bullet belts.”
“So you’re Teffi, are you?”
“Yes,” I confess. (There is, after all, no getting away from this.)
“The writer?”
I give a silent nod. He’s going to say no. Why else would he have emerged so suddenly?
“Would you mind just writing your name in this notebook? That’s right. With the date and the year.”
I write with a trembling hand. First I forget the date, then the year. I am rescued by a frightened whisper from someone behind me.
“So,” the superior repeats sombrely. He frowns. He reads what I have written. And then his stern mouth slides into a warm and confidential smile: “You see… I wanted your autograph.”
“You flatter me!”
I receive my permit.
Gooskin now further proves his worth. He brings the commissar along. The commissar is indeed terrible. Not a human being, but a nose in boots. There are creatures called cephalopods. Well, he is a rhinopod. A vast nose, to which are attached two legs. One leg, evidently, contains the heart, while the other contains the digestive tract. And these legs are encased in yellow lace-up boots that go right up to his thighs. These boots clearly mean a great deal to the commissar. He is very proud of them and they are, therefore, his weak spot. There indeed lies his Achilles heel. And so the serpent prepares to strike.
“I hear you are a lover of the arts,” I begin my oblique approach. And then, with sudden feminine naïveté, as if unable to control myself, I exclaim, “Ah, what wonderful boots!”
The nose blushes and puffs itself up a little.
“Hem… the Arts… I adore the theatre, although I have seldom had the opportunity—”
“What astonishing boots! Truly the boots of a warrior. I can’t help thinking you must be an extraordinary man!”
“No, no, whatever makes you say that?” the commissar protests feebly. “Let’s just say that ever since childhood I have loved beauty and heroism… and service to the people.”
Heroism and service to the people—these are words best avoided. It is in the name of service to the people that the Bat has been stripped. Art and beauty are surer ground.
“No, no, don’t deny it! I sense in you a profoundly artistic nature. You love the arts. You are a true patron of art; you do everything in your power to bring art to the people—into the thick of them, into their depths, into their heart of hearts. Your boots are truly remarkable. Only Torquato Tasso7 could have worn boots like yours, and maybe not even him. You are a genius!”
That last word settles everything. I am given permission to take a flask of perfume and two evening dresses across the frontier—as tools of my trade.
In the evening Gooskin took the commissar to see the operetta, Catherine the Great. Lolo and I had written the libretto together.8
The commissar softened still more, gave free rein to his feelings and ordered Gooskin to inform me that “art is indeed of material significance” and that I could take with me whatever I needed: he would say nothing. He would be as quiet “as a fish against a brick wall.”
I never saw the commissar again.
My last days in Moscow pass in a senseless whirl.
Bella Kaza-Roza, a former chanteuse from the Ancient Theatre, arrives from Petersburg.9 These last days have brought out a peculiar talent in her: She always knows who needs what and who possesses what.
In she comes, a distant look in her dark rapt eyes, and says, “In the Krivo-Arbat Lane, in the fabric store on the corner, they’ve still got a yard and a half of batiste. You absolutely must go and buy it.”
“But I don’t need any batiste.”
“Yes, you do. When you come back in a month’s time, there won’t be a scrap to be found anywhere.”
Another time she rushes in, out of breath, and says, “You must make yourself a velvet dress this very minute!”
“?”
“You know very well that you simply can’t go on without one. The owner of the hardware store on the corner is selling a length of curtain. She’s only just taken it down. Fresh as can be—nails and all. It’ll make a wonderful evening dress. You simply can’t do without it. And you’ll never get a chance like this again!”
The look on her face is serious, almost tragic.
I hate the word “never.” Were someone to tell me that I’ll never again get a headache, even that would probably scare me.
I do as I’m told. I buy the luxurious scrap of cloth with the seven nails.
Those last days were strange indeed.
At night we hurried past the dark houses, down streets where people were strangled and robbed. We hurried to listen to Silva10 or else to sit in down-at-heel cafés packed with people in shabby coats that stank of wet dog. There we listened to young poets reading—or rather howling—their own and one another’s work; they sounded like hungry wolves. There was quite a vogue for these poets, and even the haughty Bryusov would sometimes deign to introduce one of their “Evenings of Eros.”11
Everyone wanted company, to be in the presence of other people.
To be alone and at home was frightening.
We had to know what was going on; we needed to keep hearing news of one another. Sometimes someone would disappear and then it would be almost impossible to find out what had happened to them. Had they gone to Kiev? Or to the place from which there was no return?
It was as if we were living in the tale about Zmey Gorynych, the dragon that required a yearly tribute of twelve fair maidens and twelve young men.12 One might well wonder how the people in this tale could have carried on, how they could have lived with the knowledge that a dragon would soon be devouring the finest of their children. During those last days in Moscow, however, we realized that they too had probably been rushing from one little theatre to another or hurrying to buy themselves something from which to make a coat or a dress. There is nowhere a human being cannot live. With my own eyes I have seen sailors taking a man out onto the ice in order to shoot him—and I have seen the condemned man hopping over puddles to keep his feet dry and turning up his collar to shield his chest from the wind. Those few steps were the last steps he would ever take, and instinctively he wanted to make them as comfortable as possible.
We were no different. We bought ourselves some “last scraps” of fabric. We listened for the last time to the last operetta and the last exquisitely erotic verses. What did it matter whether the verses were good or terrible? All that mattered was not to know, not to be aware—we had to forget that we were being led onto the ice.
News came from Petersburg that the Cheka13 had arrested a well-known actress for reading my short stories in public. She was ordered to read one of the stories again, before three dread judges. You can imagine what fun it was for her to stand between guards with bayonets and declaim my comic monologue. And then—miracle of miracles!—after her first few trembling sentences, the face of one of the judges dissolved into a smile.
“I heard this story one evening at comrade Lenin’s. It’s entirely apolitical.”
Reassured by this, the judges asked the suspect—who was, of course, also greatly reassured—to continue her reading, “by way of revolutionary entertainment.”
Still, all in all, it probably wasn’t such a bad idea to be going away, even if only for a month. For a change of climate.
By now Gooskin was proving his worth more than ever. Perhaps more from nerves than from any real need. One morning, for some reason, he had been over to see Averchenko.
“It was awful,” he told me, waving his hands in the air. “At ten o’clock this morning I hurried over to see Averchenko—and what did I find? He was snoring—snoring cats and dogs! He’s going to miss the train!”
“But I thought we weren’t leaving for another five days.”
“The train leaves at ten o’clock. If he sleeps like that today, then what’s to stop him from sleeping like that a week from now? He’ll be sleeping like that his whole life. He’ll be sleeping—and we’ll be waiting. Wonderful!”
Gooskin dashed about. He got more and more agitated. He moved faster and faster. He flapped his hands in the air, like a broken belt drive. But had it not been for his frenzied energy, who knows how my life would have turned out? Wherever you are, O my pseudonymous Gooskin, I send you my greetings!
2
The day for our departure was constantly being postponed.
First, there would be delays with someone’s travel permit. Then it would turn out that our hope of hopes, our Nose-in-Boots, had yet to return to his frontier post.
My own preparations were more or less complete. My trunk was now full. Another trunk, in which I had packed a number of old Russian shawls (the latest of my crazes), had been stowed away in Lolo’s apartment.
But what if the authorities suddenly declared some “Week of Poverty”—or, for that matter, a “Week of Elegance”—and all these shawls were confiscated?
In the event of trouble, I asked Lolo to state that the trunk was of proletarian origin, that it belonged to Fedosya, his former cook. And to make all this more convincing and to ensure that the trunk was treated with proper respect, I put a portrait of Lenin inside it, with the inscription, “Darling Fedosya, whose memory I shall treasure with the deepest affection. Your loving Vova.”14
Not even these measures proved of any help.
Those last Moscow days passed by in a turbid whirl. People appeared out of the mist, spun around and faded from sight; then new people appeared. It was like standing on a riverbank in the spring twilight and watching great blocks of ice float past: On one block is something that could be either a cart packed with straw or a Ukrainian peasant hut; on another block are scorched logs and something that looks like a wolf. Everything spins around a few times and then the current sweeps it away forever. And never will you learn what it really was.
Various engineers, doctors, and journalists made brief appearances. Now and then some actress or other would show up.
A landowner I knew passed through on his way from Petersburg to his estate in Kazan. From Kazan he wrote that the peasants had looted his home and that he had been doing the rounds of their huts buying back his paintings and books. In one hut he had seen a miracle: a portrait of me painted by Schleifer,15 hanging in the icon corner next to Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker. The woman who had been allotted this portrait had taken it into her head that I was a holy martyr.
Lydia Yavorskaya was cast up on our shores.16 She arrived unexpectedly, as elegant as ever, and talked about how we must all join forces and organize something. Just what, I never understood. She was accompanied by some kind of boy scout in shorts, whom she referred to rather solemnly as “M’sieur Sobolev.” The block of ice spun around, and they floated away into the mist.
Mironova made a no less sudden appearance. She performed a few pieces at a little theatre on the outskirts of town and disappeared too.
Then a woman I liked very much, an actress from some provincial town, floated into our circle. Someone stole her diamonds, and she turned for help to a criminal investigations commissar. This commissar turned out to be someone kind and good-natured. He did what he could to help and then, learning that she would be spending the evening with a group of writers, asked her to take him along with her. He adored literature but had never set eyes on a living writer; nothing could make him happier than to glimpse us in the flesh. The actress asked our permission, then brought him along. Never in my life have I seen someone so tall. His voice was like a great bell high above us, but the words this bell sounded were surprisingly sentimental: well-known children’s verses, and declarations that until this moment his life had been only a matter of mind—or “moind,” as he put it—but that now his heart had awoken.
