Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics) by Chandler Robert

Author:Chandler, Robert [Chandler, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141910246
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

TEFFI (Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaya, 1872–1952)

Teffi was born in St Petersburg into a distinguished family that treasured literature; she and her three sisters all became writers. Her elder sister was considered a leading poet of the age, and both her younger sisters published articles in periodicals and had plays performed in theatres. Soon after the beginning of her career, in the early 1900s, she began to write under the name ‘Teffi’; although this is sometimes thought to come from the English ‘Taffy’, she herself, in her story ‘Pseudonym’, says it derives from ‘Steffi’, a familiar form of ‘Stepan’ – the name of a friend. After the Russian Revolution, Teffi settled in Paris. There she played a prominent role in literary life, organizing a salon and, with impressive regularity, contributing weekly columns and stories to leading periodicals for the next twenty years.

During the course of her life she wrote in a variety of styles and genres: political feuilletons published in the Bolshevik newspaper New Life (Novaya Zhizn) during her brief period of radical fervour after the 1905 Revolution; Symbolist poems that she declaimed or sang in the most important Petersburg literary salons; popular one-act plays, mainly satirical treatments of topical subjects – one was entitled The Woman Question; and a novel entitled simply Adventure Novel (1930). Her finest works, however, are her short stories and her Memoirs (1928–9), a witty, thoughtful yet tragic account of her last months in Russia before emigrating in 1919.

As well as being admired by writers of the stature of Bunin, Bulgakov and Zoshchenko, Teffi was hugely popular throughout her life. In pre-Revolutionary Russia, candies and perfumes were named after her; after the Revolution, her stories were published and her plays performed throughout the Russian diaspora. Between her death and the first Soviet publication of her work in 1989, however, she was almost forgotten. This was probably for several reasons: because she was a woman; because she was considered ‘lightweight’ (critics noticed her humour more than her perceptiveness); and because some of her more than five hundred stories were obviously written in a hurry. Also, as I have said with regard to Bunin, there was a long period during which both Western and Soviet scholars paid little attention to émigré literature in general. Since the early 1990s Teffi has been ever more widely published.

‘Love’ is perhaps the finest of her stories about children; ‘A Family Journey’ is characteristic of her later work, as witty as it is sombre.

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