{"id":152148,"date":"2021-04-22T13:58:34","date_gmt":"2021-04-22T17:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=152148"},"modified":"2021-04-22T13:58:34","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T17:58:34","slug":"the-grace-of-teffi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/04\/22\/the-grace-of-teffi\/","title":{"rendered":"The Grace of Teffi"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following serves as the foreword to <\/em>Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints<\/a>, a newly translated selection of the Russian writer Teffi\u2019s stories, which was published earlier this week by New York Review Books.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Teffi. Photo courtesy of New York Review Books.<\/p><\/div>\n

There are writers who muddy their own water, to make it seem deeper. Teffi could not be more different: the water is entirely transparent, yet the bottom is barely visible.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Georgy Adamovich<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is not unusual for a writer to be pigeonholed, but few great writers have suffered from this more than Teffi. Several of her finest works are extremely bleak, but many Russians still know only the comic and satirical sketches she wrote during her first years as a professional writer, from 1901 until 1918. Few critics have recognized the full breadth of her human sympathy, her Chekhovian ability to write convincingly about people from every level of society: illiterate peasants, respectable bourgeois, monks and priests, eccentric poets, bewildered \u00e9migr\u00e9s, and public figures ranging from Lev Tolstoy to Rasputin and Lenin. Teffi also has a remarkable gift for writing about children, for showing us the world from the perspective of a small child.<\/p>\n

Throughout her life, Teffi was a practicing member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Both Orthodox Christianity and Russian folk religion, with its poetic understanding of spiritual matters, were important to her. And she recognized that many of her finest stories were those inspired by these themes. In December 1943, she wrote to the historian Piotr Kovalevsky: \u201cWhich of my things do I most value? I think that the stories \u2018Solovki\u2019 and \u2018A Quiet Backwater\u2019 and the collection Witch<\/em> are well written. In Witch<\/em> you find our ancient Slav gods, how they still live on in the soul of the people, in legends, superstitions, and customs. Everything as I encountered it in the Russian provinces, as a child.\u201d <\/p>\n

Teffi made few such direct statements about her work. I know just one other passage in a similar vein:<\/p>\n

During those years of my distant childhood, we used to spend the summer in a wonderful, blessed country\u2014at my mother\u2019s estate in Volhynia Province. I was very little. I had only just begun to learn to read and write\u2014so I must have been about five \u2026 What slipped quickly through the lives of adults was for us a matter of complex and turbulent experience, entering our games and our dreams, inserting itself like a brightly colored thread into the pattern of our life, into that first firm foundation that psychoanalysts now investigate with such art and diligence, seeing it as the prime cause of many of the madnesses of the human soul.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These two statements have guided our choice of stories. We have translated all but one of the stories from Witch<\/em>. We have included the two other stories Teffi mentions: \u201cSolovki,\u201d an account of a pilgrimage to the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, and \u201cA Quiet Backwater,\u201d which incorporates a memorable monologue about the patron saints of various birds, insects, and animals. And we have chosen ten other stories on similar themes, many of them from the first of Teffi\u2019s more serious collections, The Lifeless Beast<\/em>. For the main part, we present the stories according to their order of publication. The one exception is that we begin with \u201cKishmish,\u201d which was written much later. This short, semiautobiographical story serves as a perfect introduction to many of the main themes of Other Worlds<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This is the first time that Teffi\u2019s more \u201cotherworldly\u201d stories have been brought together in this manner. Our hope is that this will allow readers a clearer sense of the depth of understanding beneath her dazzling wit and brilliance.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Teffi was well aware of how often her work was misunderstood. Her preface to The Lifeless Beast<\/em> begins:<\/p>\n

I do not like prefaces \u2026<\/p>\n

I would not be writing a preface now were it not for a sad incident.<\/p>\n

In October 1914 I published the story \u201cYavdokha.\u201d This melancholy and painful story is about a lonely old peasant woman. She is illiterate and muddle-headed and so hopelessly benighted that, when she receives news of the death of her son, she is unable to grasp what has happened. Instead, she wonders whether or not he will be sending her money.<\/p>\n

One angry newspaper then \u2026 indignantly scolded me for laughing at human grief.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat does Madame Teffi find funny about this?\u201d the newspaper asked indignantly. After quoting the very saddest passages of all, it repeated, \u201cAnd does she consider this funny? And is this funny, too?\u201d<\/p>\n

The newspaper would probably be most surprised if I were to tell it that I did not laugh for a single minute \u2026<\/p>\n

And so the aim of this preface is to warn the reader that there is a great deal in this book that is not funny.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Several of the stories in The Lifeless Beast<\/em> seem startlingly modern. The journalist\u2019s misunderstanding shows us how far beyond the conventions of her time Teffi had moved. Yavdokha has no companion but a hog and is hunchbacked from living in a hut that has sunk deep into the ground. She lives five miles from the nearest village and is alienated both from the other peasants and from everything to do with the Russian state. After someone has read out a letter informing her of her son\u2019s death she repeats the word \u201cwar\u201d\u2014but it is unclear if she even grasps what the word means and she certainly does not take in that her son has died. Yavdokha could have stepped out of one of Samuel Beckett\u2019s last plays.<\/p>\n

Curiously, misunderstandings not unlike the journalist\u2019s are a central theme of The Lifeless Beast<\/em>. In some stories, the misunderstandings arise from differences of social class; in others, it is the young and healthy who fail to understand the old and needy; in still others it is adults who fail\u2014or do not even try\u2014to understand children. Teffi\u2019s portrayal of human failings is unflinching; in \u201cHappiness,\u201d she describes happiness as an \u201cempty and hungry\u201d creature that can survive only if fed with the \u201cwarm, human meat\u201d of someone else\u2019s envy. In a smaller number of stories, however, she evokes moments of genuine love and compassion. In \u201cDaisy,\u201d a seemingly inane aristocratic lady enrolls as a military nurse because that is the fashionable thing to do, quickly becomes involved in her work, and, to her surprise, is deeply moved by the gratitude of an uneducated soldier she helps to treat. \u201cThe Heart\u201d follows a similar pattern; Rakhatova, a frivolous actress, thinks it would be entertaining to confess to a simple, poorly educated monk before receiving Communion in a remote monastery. She is taken aback by the monk\u2019s spontaneous joy when she says she has not \u201ccommitted any grave sins.\u201d<\/p>\n

The eyes now looking at her were so clear and joyful that they seemed to be flickering, just as stars flicker when their clear light overflows \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cPraise the Lord! Praise the Lord!\u201d<\/p>\n

He was trembling all over. It was as if he were a large severed heart and a drop of living water had fallen onto it. The heart quivers\u2014and then all the other dead, severed pieces quiver too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As always, Teffi\u2019s imagery is carefully developed. The last sentence refers back to the scene that greeted Rakhatova and her friends when they arrived at the monastery the previous day:<\/p>\n

The peasant was hacking at the fish with a broad knife \u2026<\/p>\n

Then the peasant took a bucket and poured water over the pieces of fish and the severed head. There was a sudden move\u00adment in one of the middle pieces. A twitch, a quiver\u2014and the whole fish responded. Even the chopped-off tail jerked.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s its heart contracting,\u201d said the Medico.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Born in 1872, Teffi was a contemporary of Alexander Blok and other leading Russian Symbolists. Her own poetry is derivative, but in her prose she shows a remarkable gift for grounding Symbolist themes and imagery in the everyday world. \u201cThe Heart\u201d is entirely realistic and at times even gossipy\u2014yet the story is permeated throughout with Christian symbolism relating to fish. In \u201cA Quiet Backwater,\u201d she achieves a still more successful synthesis of the heavenly and the earthly. Toward the end of this seven-page story a laundress gives a long disquisition on the name days of various birds, insects, and animals. The mare, the bee, the glowworm\u2014she tells a young visitor\u2014all have their name days. And so does the earth herself: \u201cAnd the Feast of the Holy Ghost is the name day of the earth herself. On this day, no one dairnst disturb the earth. No diggin, or sowin\u2014not even flower pickin, or owt. No buryin t\u2019 dead. Great sin it is, to upset the earth on \u2019er name day. Aye, even beasts understand. On that day, they dairnst lay a claw, nor a hoof, nor a paw on the earth. Great sin, yer see.\u201d In a key poem\u2014almost a manifesto\u2014of French Symbolism, Charles Baudelaire interprets the whole world as a web of mystical \u201ccorrespondences.\u201d In a less grandiose way, Teffi conveys a similar vision. She was, I imagine, delighted by the paradox of the earth\u2019s name day being the Feast of the Holy Spirit\u2014not, as one might expect, the feast of a saint associated with some activity like plowing.<\/p>\n

The Lifeless Beast<\/em> is notable for its striking imagery and bold rendition of peasant speech, and for being one of a very few treatments in Russian literature of World War I as experienced by civilians. Teffi\u2019s insight into human selfishness and viciousness never wavers. Nevertheless, she remains true to her faith in Christian love\u2014as practiced by Daisy in a field hospital, as experienced by Rakhatova through Orthodox ritual, and as embodied in the generous, restorative understandings of folk religion.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In early 1920 Teffi settled in Paris. Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9s throughout the world were quick to set up publishing houses and Teffi was one of their most valued authors. In 1921 alone she published five books: two miniature selections of articles and stories, in Berlin; a collection of comic sketches, in Shanghai; the short story collection Black Iris<\/em>, in Stockholm; and A Quiet Backwater<\/em>\u2014which includes most of the stories from The Lifeless Beast<\/em>\u2014in Paris.<\/p>\n

Teffi\u2019s high standing is still more clearly shown by her publications in periodicals. \u201cKe fer?\u201d (Que Faire?)\u2014a brilliant evocation of the Russians\u2019 sense of alienation in Paris\u2014was published in April 1920, in the first issue of the important The Latest News<\/em>. And \u201cSolovki\u201d\u2014an almost Brueghelesque account of the widespread practice of mass pilgrimage to holy sites\u2014was the first item in the first issue (August 1921) of the glamorous, lavishly illustrated journal The Firebird<\/em>, which featured work by almost all the best-known \u00e9migr\u00e9 writers and artists. These two publications serve as markers to the twin paths Teffi would follow for the next fifty years. Many of her stories are about the mishaps and absurdities of \u00e9migr\u00e9 life; others are about a long-lost past.<\/p>\n

\u201cSolovki\u201d was republished in Evening Day<\/em>. Teffi\u2019s following collection, A Small Town<\/em> (Paris, 1927), is not represented in Other Worlds<\/em>, since most of the stories deal with her \u00e9migr\u00e9 present\u2014the \u201csmall town\u201d of Russian Paris\u2014rather than her Russian past. We have, however, included three stories from The Book of June<\/em>. Like \u201cSolovki,\u201d the title story is a sympathetic account of overwhelming religious experience. Here, however, Teffi enters more deeply into the heroine\u2019s inner world, into her most inarticulate thoughts and feelings; it is one of Teffi\u2019s most sensitive treatments of adolescence.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Most of the stories in Witch<\/em> bear the titles of folkloric beings\u2014for example, \u201cWonder Worker,\u201d \u201cThe House Spirit,\u201d or \u201cRusalka\u201d (a female water spirit resembling the Lorelei). Some of the stories are grim, some fanciful, some sober and philosophical. Some are realistic, with only the merest hint at the supernatural; in others, the supernatural motifs are more pronounced. Sometimes a character tries all too transparently to cover up his or her misconduct through some implausible supernatural explanation; sometimes it is the rationalist skeptics who appear foolish and blinkered. One piece, \u201cAbout the House,\u201d is hardly a story at all\u2014more like a chatty retelling of a scholarly article, with a brief anecdote tacked on at the end.<\/p>\n

All the stories are presented from the perspective of a Russian exile. Often the tone is nostalgic. Sometimes there is a note of bewilderment: Could such things truly have happened? Could such a world as old Russia really have existed?<\/p>\n

Witch<\/em> is a coherent and self-contained collection. Its main themes, however, are anticipated in \u201cWild Evening\u201d and \u201cShapeshifter,\u201d the last two stories in The Book of June<\/em>. The central character of these two stories\u2014and also of the first and last stories of Witch<\/em>\u2014is clearly modeled on Teffi herself. In 1892, at age twenty, Teffi married a lawyer by the name of Vladislav Buchinsky. We know little about her years as a young wife and mother, living in small provincial towns, but we know from statements Teffi made later that she was deeply unhappy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWild Evening\u201d is about fear of the unknown; except for an opportunistic peddler, everyone in the story\u2014the young Teffi, the monks, even the horse\u2014is in a state of terror. All around lurk threatening forces\u2014darkness, cattle plague, the unclean dead. \u201cShapeshifter\u201d may represent Teffi\u2019s fantasy of a different course her life might have followed; a stranger\u2019s chance intervention prompts the Teffi figure to decide against<\/em> marriage to a lawyer who has much in common with the real-life Buchinsky. The opening, title story of Witch<\/em> shows us a young husband and wife feeling more and more exasperated with each other as they grow ever more afraid\u2014though neither will admit it\u2014of a maid suspected of witchcraft. And in \u201cWolf Night,\u201d the concluding story of Witch<\/em>, we glimpse this same husband and wife perhaps a year or two later. The husband has grown even more resentful and evil-tempered, and the wife\u2014now pregnant\u2014is overwhelmed by nightmares of the house being surrounded by wolves. Ten lines before the end of the story, the husband says to the wife, \u201cPlease! Do me a favor! Go and stay with your oh so clever mother. A fine way she must have brought you up, to make you into such a hysteric.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teffi did not ever go back to her \u201coh so clever mother,\u201d though it is possible that her husband may have uttered some sarcasm similar to the above. All we know for sure is that in 1898, probably on the edge of a breakdown, Teffi abandoned her husband and three children and moved back to Saint Petersburg to begin her career as a professional writer. There is little doubt that this rupture\u2014which she very seldom spoke about\u2014was a source of almost unbearable guilt and pain. Nevertheless, the words she wrote nearly fifty years later to her eldest daughter have the ring of truth. After saying she had been a bad mother, Teffi backtracks: \u201cIn essence I was good, but circumstances drove me from home, where, had I remained, I would have perished.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the heart of Witch<\/em>, framed by these stories drawing on her unhappy life as a young woman, stands a group of six stories in which Teffi moves further back in time, to her own childhood. At one level, these can be read as a fictional treatment of folk beliefs in Volhynia (now part of western Ukraine). At the same time, they constitute a memorial to Teffi\u2019s younger sister Lena, the closest to her of her six siblings. Lena had died in 1919, and Teffi writes movingly about her death in Memories<\/em>, which she completed only shortly before the stories in Witch<\/em>. In both books, Teffi portrays herself and Lena as inseparable.<\/p>\n

One of these stories, \u201cThe Kind That Walk,\u201d is a study of anti-Semitism\u2014and of xenophobia more generally. Teffi deftly shows us people\u2019s blind fear of Moshka, an honest and competent Jewish carpenter; she is equally deft in evoking the fascination with which she and Lena listen to the adults\u2019 wild talk about how Moshka, many years earlier, had been dragged off by the devil. Many of the other main characters in these six stories are domestic servants. Teffi\u2019s mother and some of her elder siblings appear now and then, but it is the children\u2019s Nyanya, or nanny, who is the most important authority figure.<\/p>\n

There are also two stories set mainly in Moscow and Petersburg. The longer of these, \u201cThe Dog,\u201d begins with the narrator, Lyalya, recalling idyllically happy summers as a teenager on a country estate in the company of friends and admirers. In those<\/em> days, she says with pained emphasis, she was carefree and high-spirited. She had felt briefly troubled, however, by the intense feeling with which a shy young boy called Tolya once swore eternal devotion to her, promising always to remain her \u201cfaithful dog.\u201d A few years later, Lyalya falls in with the bohemian crowd who frequent the Stray Dog, the famous Saint Petersburg cabaret where all the major poets of the time used to give readings. Somehow, almost inadvertently, Lyalya takes up with Harry Edvers, a particularly odious pseudo-poet who later ends up working for the Cheka, the Bolshevik security police. In the story\u2019s final scene she calls on her \u201cfaithful dog\u201d for help\u2014with dramatic results. Lyalya concludes:<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the whole story; that\u2019s what I wanted to tell you. I\u2019ve made nothing up; I\u2019ve added nothing; and there\u2019s nothing I can explain\u2014or even want to explain. But when I turn back and consider the past, I can see everything clearly. I can see each separate event and the axis or thread upon which a certain force had strung them.<\/p>\n

It had strung the events on the thread like beads and tied up the loose ends.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe Dog\u201d is convincing on every level. As an evocation of a lost childhood paradise, the first pages bear comparison with the work of Teffi\u2019s friend and colleague Ivan Bunin. As a reckoning with the febrile cultural world of prerevolutionary Saint Petersburg, it anticipates Anna Akhmatova\u2019s Poem without a Hero<\/em> (written 1940\u20131965). Like Akhmatova, Teffi sees the bohemian abandonment of traditional moral values as having paved the way for the brutalities and duplicities of Communism. And the denouement provides a fine example of a writer drawing on the occult not for exotic ornament but as a source of psychological truth. The huge dog\u2019s sudden appearance may be mere chance; it may be a real embodiment of Tolya\u2019s loyal and resolute spirit; or it may be Tolya\u2019s spirit prompting Lyalya toward an act that requires superhuman powers. Teffi has taken care not to exclude any of these possibilities. Unlike the \u201ccertain force\u201d spoken of by her narrator, she does not tie up the story\u2019s loose ends.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In the letter quoted earlier, Teffi says of Witch<\/em>, \u201cThis book has been highly praised by Bunin, Kuprin, and Merezhkovsky. They praised it for its artistry and the excellence of its language. I am, by the way, proud of my language, which critics have seldom commented on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teffi\u2019s pride is justified. Along with Andrey Bely, Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Andrey Platonov, she is one of a number of great twentieth-century Russian prose writers who were also poets but whose poetic gifts found their truest expression in prose. It is difficult, though, to define what makes Teffi\u2019s language so remarkable. She makes skillful use of repetition, often using a single word as a leitmotif for an entire story. In \u201cWild Evening,\u201d for example, she uses the adjective dikii<\/em> (wild) of a horse\u2019s eye, of the night, of a person, and of the dangerously high seat of a two-wheel carriage. In \u201cRusalka\u201d she repeats mutnyi <\/em>(murky, cloudy, troubled) more and more often in the course of the story; she uses the word especially often in relation to the two sisters\u2019 troubled visions in the last pages, when one of the housemaids either drowns or turns into a rusalka<\/em> and the girls fall ill with scarlet fever. It is also true that Teffi has a fine ear for the linguistic peculiarities of people from different social groups\u2014ranging from Volhynia peasants to Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9s in Paris; it is not for nothing that the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, as a novice writer, noted down some of Teffi\u2019s most striking coinages and malapropisms. Nevertheless, the twenties was a rich period for Russian prose and none of the above is enough to make Teffi unique.<\/p>\n

What truly sets her apart is her lightness of touch. More than Vladislav Khodasevich, more than Akhmatova or any of the Acmeist poets, it is Teffi who has inherited the grace and fluency of Pushkin. She can write as simply and tautly as Hemingway\u2014but without the least sense of willed tightness. She can write long, complex sentences dense with embedded participial clauses, yet these sentences, unlike apparently similar sentences in the work of Bunin, retain a conversational quality. Some of her more unreliable narrators come out with phrases as memorably absurd as characters out of Zoshchenko\u2014yet even here there is a difference. Zoshchenko\u2019s sentences seem brilliantly constructed; Teffi\u2019s appear simply to have happened. It may be for this very reason\u2014her success in creating an illusion of naturalness\u2014that Teffi\u2019s language has received so little scholarly attention.<\/p>\n

Many of her greatest contemporaries, however, were well aware of her gifts. Zoshchenko studied her intently; Bunin admired her; Mikhail Bulgakov borrowed from her Civil War articles for The White Guard<\/em>. And Georgy Ivanov referred to Teffi as \u201ca unique phenomenon in Russian literature, a true miracle that people will still be wondering at in a hundred years\u2019 time, crying and laughing at once.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The last two pieces in this collection are \u201cBaba Yaga\u201d and \u201cVolya,\u201d two essays from Earthly Rainbow<\/em> (published six months before Teffi\u2019s death), in which Teffi asserts her profound Russianness. Baba Yaga is the name of the archetypal Russian folktale witch and the word volya<\/em>\u00a0is used for what Teffi understands as a peculiarly Russian kind of unbounded emotional freedom. Both essays end with a heartfelt cry. Baba Yaga, confined in her wintry hut, longing for wildness, freedom, and open spaces, cries, \u201cB\u2014o\u2014r\u2014i\u2014n\u2014g<\/em>.\u201d And in the last lines of \u201cVolya\u201d the aging Teffi remembers herself as a young woman, waving at the spring dawn and crying out, \u201cVo-o-o-ly-a-a-a<\/em>!\u201d Shortly before this, she has heard a boy on the other side of the river singing his heart out. The last line of his song\u2014\u201cSing Volya, Volya, Volya<\/em>!\u201d\u2014is described as \u201cheartrending, piercingly joyful, like a sudden yelp, coming from somewhere too deep in the soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teffi is indeed one of the most graceful of Russian writers. It seems likely, however, that this grace is a way of managing an almost unbearable burden of pain. There are a great many heartfelt cries in these stories. Some of these cries and desperate screams seem almost infectious, so agonizing that those who hear them can\u2019t help but let out similar screams. The epileptic sleigh driver in \u201cShapeshifter,\u201d for example, lets out a cry with \u201csomething so terrible about it\u201d that the narrator screams, too, jumping up from her seat and almost tumbling out of the sleigh. And the narrator of \u201cWitch\u201d describes, at some length, the scream of a guinea hen \u201cwailing for her slaughtered mate.\u201d She continues:<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t easy to explain to you, but such a cry of inconsolable despair, above the dead little town, in the silence of that trackless steppe, was more than any human soul could bear.<\/p>\n

I remember coming home and saying to my husband, \u201cNow I know why people hang themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

He screamed, clutching his head in his hands.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the last pages of \u201cThe Book of June,\u201d Katya lets out repeated screams of terror: \u201cKatya had no idea what made her keep on screaming like this. Some kind of lump seemed to be filling her throat, making her gasp and wheeze and scream out Grisha\u2019s name.\u201d And two of Teffi\u2019s very finest works end with still wilder cries. The heroine of \u201cSolovki\u201d gives herself up to a prolonged scream during a service in the main monastery church: \u201cWhat mattered was not to stop, to expend more and more of herself in the cry, to give herself to it more intensely, yes, more and more of herself: Oh, if only they didn\u2019t get in her way. Oh, if only they let her keep going<\/em> \u2026 But it was so hard. Would she have the strength?\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the most painful passages in all Teffi\u2019s work is the last page of her autobiographical Memories<\/em>, her account of her final, irrevocable departure from Russia. It is the summer of 1919 and she is on her way to Istanbul, on a boat leaving Novorossiysk harbor:<\/p>\n

From the lower deck comes the sound of long, obstinate wails, interspersed with words of lament.<\/p>\n

Where have I heard such wails before? Yes. I remember. During the first year of the war. A gray-haired old woman was being taken down the street in a horse-drawn cab. Her hat had slipped back onto the nape of her neck. Her yellow cheeks were thin and drawn. Her toothless black mouth was hanging open, crying out in a long tearless wail: \u201cA-a-a-a-a!\u201d Probably embarrassed by the disgraceful behavior of his passenger, the driver was urging his poor horse forward, whipping her on.<\/p>\n

Yes, my good man, you didn\u2019t think enough about whom you were picking up in your cab. And now you\u2019re stuck with this old woman. A terrible, black, tearless wail. A last wail. Over all of Russia, the whole of Russia \u2026 No stopping now \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These cries and wails differ in tone. The boy\u2019s \u201csudden yelp\u201d in \u201cVolya\u201d is \u201cpiercingly joyful,\u201d whereas the gray-haired woman in Memories<\/em> is mired in despair. In at least one respect, however, the cries are all too similar. All are painfully raw; all come from \u201csomewhere too deep in the soul.\u201d It is as if these characters have been flayed. Layers of protective skin have been torn away and what should be hidden lies dangerously exposed.<\/p>\n

Teffi\u2019s grace seems all the more precious when we understand that it was both a protective cloak and her way of trying to keep her footing. It may perhaps have been what enabled her, unlike many of her contemporaries, to preserve her balance and sanity throughout a seemingly never-ending series of catastrophes\u2014World War I, the Russian Civil War, the viciousness of \u00e9migr\u00e9 political infighting, and life under German occupation during World War II. If Teffi liked to refer to herself as a witch, if she identified at the end of her life with Baba Yaga, this may be because she was hoping to charm the inner and outer darkness, to cast a spell on it that might keep it at bay.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Robert Chandler\u2019s translations from Russian include Alexander Pushkin\u2019s <\/em>The Captain\u2019s Daughter; Nikolai Leskov\u2019s <\/em>Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; Vasily Grossman\u2019s <\/em>An Armenian Sketchbook, <\/em>Everything Flows, <\/em>Stalingrad, <\/em>Life and Fate, and <\/em>The Road; and Hamid Ismailov\u2019s <\/em>The Railway. His cotranslations of Andrey Platonov have won prizes both in the UK and in the U.S. As well as running regular translation workshops in London and teaching in an annual literary translation summer school, he works as a mentor for the British Centre for Literary Translation.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from the foreword to <\/em>Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints<\/a>, by Teffi, edited and with a foreword by Robert Chandler, translated by Chandler and several others, including Anne-Marie Jackson, Sabrina Jaszi, Sara Jolly, Nicolas Pasternak Slater, and Sian Valvis, published by NYRB Classics. Foreword copyright \u00a9 2021 by Robert Chandler.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More than Vladislav Khodasevich, more than Anna Akhmatova or any of the Acmeist poets, it is Teffi who has inherited the grace and fluency of Pushkin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1781,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-152148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Grace of Teffi by Robert Chandler<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"More than Vladislav Khodasevich, more than Anna Akhmatova or any of the Acmeist poets, it is Teffi who has inherited the grace and fluency of Pushkin.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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