by Teffi
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 theater 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.
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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 humor 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 humor, 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 theaters, 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 behavior 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 theater 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 splendor.” 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 valor 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 humor 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 aging 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 b
eautiful 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 traveler 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.
