E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
Teffi Subtly Worded and Other Stories
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78227-083-6
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-083-6
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Teffi was a phenomenally popular writer in pre-revolutionary Russia - a favourite of Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin alike. She was born in 1872 into a prominent St Petersburg family and emigrated from Bolshevik Russia in 1919. She eventually settled in Paris, where she became an important figure in the émigré literary scene, and where she lived until her death in 1952. A master of the short form, in her lifetime Teffi published countless stories, plays and feuilletons. After her death, she was gradually forgotten, but the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about her rediscovery by Russian readers. Pushkin Press also publishes Subtly Worded, Rasputin and Other Ironies and Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea.
Weitere Infos & Material
IN THE YEARS before the Revolution, Teffi was a literary star. People quoted lines from her work in conversation. Strangers recognized her on the streets of St Petersburg. So broad was her appeal that her fans included such disparate figures as Vladimir Lenin and Tsar Nicholas II.1 As well as being popular with the reading public, Teffi was greatly admired by fellow writers such as Ivan Bunin, Fyodor Sologub and Mikhail Zoshchenko, to name but a few.
Although she is still often seen primarily as a humorist, the scope of her work was, almost from the beginning, broader and deeper. As often as not, her stories are small tragedies. The greatest of Soviet humorists, Mikhail Zoshchenko, once wrote: “Just try retelling one of her stories, even the funniest, and it will no longer be funny. It will come out absurd, maybe even tragic.”2 Or, in the words of the Russian critic Lidiya Spiridonova, Teffi’s stories are “funny on the outside, tragic on the inside”.3
Teffi, or Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, was born in 1872 into a prominent St Petersburg family. Her father was an eminent criminologist and a gifted raconteur, her mother a cultured woman who loved literature and passed this love on to her children. Along with her sisters and brother, Teffi was immersed in books and writing from an early age. Teffi’s older sister was the well-known poet Mirra Lokhvitskaya, dubbed the “Russian Sappho” by Ivan Bunin. Her other sisters were also published writers. Around 1890 Teffi married and went to live with her husband in the provinces, where they had three children. A decade later, however, she left her family and returned to St Petersburg. As Teffi wrote to her elder daughter in 1946, if she had remained in the marriage it would have been the end of her.
Later, as an émigrée in Paris, Teffi explained the origin of her pseudonym. She had written a play, but people kept telling her that no one would even read it unless she had theatre contacts or a big name. She felt she needed to come up with an attention-grabbing pen name, a name that might belong to either a man or a woman. When she cast about for the name of a fool—because fools were believed to be lucky—a certain Stefan came to mind, called “Steffi” by his friends. Out of delicacy, she got rid of the initial S and arrived at “Teffi”. When the press first encountered this pen name, someone assumed it was an allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s character “Taffy”. The explanation stuck and Teffi did little to discourage it.
Teffi’s first publication—a poem—appeared in 1901, but it was not until 1904 that her work began appearing with any regularity. Her satirical articles were published in a broad range of periodicals, and in 1905 she even contributed briefly to a Bolshevik newspaper. Teffi was closely associated with the journal ( after 1913) and the daily newspaper .4 usually published literature only in its holiday editions, but Teffi recalls in her memoirs that the editor Vlas Doroshevich interceded on her behalf, saying, “Let her write what she wants to write. You don’t use a pure-bred Arab to haul water.” Gradually articles gave way to fiction and, by 1911, Teffi was publishing mostly short stories.
The political reforms of 1905 had been followed by a conservative backlash; even schoolchildren were often arrested. Such absurdities furnished material for Teffi’s prose collection , one volume of which was published in 1910, followed by another in 1911. was so successful that it was reissued three times in quick succession. Similar success would accompany Teffi throughout her literary career.
In this, as in later collections, Teffi usually writes about ordinary people, whose folly she ridicules but for whom she retains a certain tenderness. ‘The Corsican’ is about a police agent trying to learn revolutionary songs so that he can become an agent provocateur and thus improve his career prospects. In ‘A Radiant Easter’, a parody of a recognized genre of sentimental and moralistic Easter stories, a petty official attempts to make a good impression on his boss, but the plan backfires. Teffi regarded marriage with a certain scepticism, and ‘Duty and Honour’, first published in the collection in 1913, pokes fun at the banality of a woman attempting to enforce a friend’s adherence to convention.
One day Teffi received a three-layered box of candies from an anonymous admirer. They were in colourful wrappers, each emblazoned with her pen name and portrait. Overjoyed, she telephoned her friends, inviting them round to sample the “Teffi” candies. She began sampling them herself and, before she realized it, had devoured nearly all three layers. “I had gorged on fame until I’d made myself ill. That’s when I understood its flip side. […] Instead of happily celebrating with my friends, I had to invite a doctor round.”5 From then on, she appears to have remained indifferent to the trappings of her celebrity.
(1916) is generally seen as the most accomplished collection that Teffi published before emigrating. In the preface she warned readers expecting light-hearted humour that “this book contains a great deal that isn’t cheerful”. ‘The Quiet Backwater’ rivals Chekhov at his best in its evocation of the language and mindset of an elderly peasant couple. Many years before, while her husband was away fighting, the wife had borne an illegitimate child. Teffi’s evocation of the silences and evasions that enable them to cope with this threat to their marriage is extraordinarily subtle. The title story, ‘The Lifeless Beast’, is told from the perspective of a young child all but forgotten amid the collapse of her parents’ marriage. The child’s world is inhabited almost entirely by beasts of one kind or another—animate and inanimate, animal and human. In ‘Jealousy’ a little girl, distressed by the attention her nanny is paying to another little girl, first wishes this girl to die and then determines to die herself. Robert Chandler writes, “Like Andrei Platonov, Teffi has a remarkable ability to evoke the inner world of a child. And like Platonov, she knows how fluid the boundary between life and death can seem to a child”:
Liza went round the lime tree, scrambling over its stout roots. In among these roots was plenty to catch the eye. In one little corner lived a dead beetle. Its wings were like the dried husks inside a cedar nut. Liza flipped the beetle onto its back with a little stick, and then onto its front, but it wasn’t afraid and didn’t run away. It was completely dead and living a peaceful life.
In 1916 Teffi was invited to two dinners attended by Rasputin. Later, in Paris, she wrote a vivid account of these meetings, all the more remarkable for the way she manages—in spite of the horror Rasputin evoked in her—to release him from cliché.
Many of Teffi’s stories and articles from the period of the Revolution and the Civil War have only recently been published in book form. Several of these pieces are included here. In ‘Petrograd Monologue’, Teffi manages to write with humour about the terrible food shortage of these years. “Funny on the outside, tragic on the inside” indeed! Social class is central to ‘One of Us’, in which a promising acquaintance between two balletomanes is nipped in the bud; even in 1918 there was evidently no escape from snobbery. And in ‘One Day in the Future’ (written and published in the St Petersburg journal not long before it was closed down) class snobbery is turned on its head; the story portrays a world in which knowledge and ability are spurned in favour of membership in the ranks of the proletariat.
In 1919, following the closure of , Teffi left St Petersburg to go on tour in Ukraine. She never saw Russia again. As the Bolsheviks continued to advance, Teffi was evacuated first from Kiev, then from Odessa, then from Novorossiysk. After passing, like so many other émigrés, through Constantinople, she ended up in Paris, settling there in 1920.
Teffi quickly became a major figure in the émigré world. ‘?’—her first feuilleton published in Paris—was a huge hit and still remains one of her best-known works. Teffi’s title alludes to Chernyshevsky’s novel , a phrase later put to use by Lenin as a revolutionary slogan. Teffi reverses the implication by putting the words into the mouth of a White general. They quickly became a catchphrase among émigrés. Full of clever interlingual word play, ‘’ brilliantly portrays the squabbling Russian émigré community, unable to find any kind of internal solidarity:
We—, as they call us—live the strangest of lives here, nothing like other people’s. We stick together, for example, not like planets, by mutual attraction, but by a force quite contrary to the laws of physics—mutual repulsion. Every hates all the others—hates them just as fervently as the others hate him.
The blackly humorous ‘Subtly Worded’, from Teffi’s 1923 collection , captures the anxiety people were experiencing with regard to what was happening back in Russia. A comparison of ‘Subtly Worded’ with Teffi’s earlier letter-writing story, ‘Duty and Honour’,...
