Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me

by Teffi

  More than twenty years of close acquaintance—and a single play on words. Evidently a joker who hid his wit under a bushel.

  Zinaida Nikolaevna looked on me with curiosity. To her I was a member of some strange species. She would say, “I absolutely must write about you one day. No one has described you properly yet.”

  “It’s too late,” I replied. “I won’t be able to act on your suggestions now, and there’s no changing the opinions of readers. They all made up their minds about me long ago.”

  But then a copy of my Witch[6] somehow found its way into their hands—and for some reason they both liked it.

  “In this volume you’re conspiring with eternity,” said Zinaida Nikolaevna.

  “What language!” said Merezhkovsky. “I’m lapping it up, lapping it up!”

  Then he added, “You’re nothing like your work. Zina is like her work, but you aren’t. This book is a delight.”

  “Heavens!” I exclaimed. “You’re trying to tell me that I’m an abomination. How awful. But I don’t think there’s much we can do about it now.”

  “But why do you give so much space in your work to the comical? I don’t much care for the comical,” Merezhkovsky once said to me.

  Not “humour”, but “the comical”. Probably his way of showing contempt.

  I reminded him of Gogol’s words about humour.

  “Listen: ‘Laughter is deeper and more significant than people think. At its bottom lies an eternally pulsating spring which lends greater depth to any subject. Even he who fears nothing else on earth fears mockery. Yet there are some who are unaware of laughter’s remarkable power. Many say that humour is base; only when something is pronounced in stern, laboured tones do they acknowledge it as sublime.’ ”[7]

  Merezhkovsky was terribly offended: “My tones aren’t in the least laboured.”

  “Of course they aren’t. Everyone knows about your modulations. This wasn’t written about you.”

  •

  Zinaida Nikolaevna often quoted from her own poems. Merezhkovsky did not like her recent work.

  “Zina, these are not poems.”

  “Yes, they are,” she insisted.

  “No, they’re not,” he shouted.

  I intervened: “I think I can reconcile you. Of course they’re poems. They have metre and rhyme—all the formal elements of verse. But they’re verse rather than poetry, prose thoughts in verse form.”

  They both accepted this. Now that they had read Witch, I was no longer she but Teffi.

  •

  I remember falling ill and spending nearly a month in bed. The Merezhkovskys visited regularly, and once, to the astonishment of everyone in the room, Dmitry Sergeyevich brought a paper cornet of cherries. He had bought them along the way. We all exchanged glances, our faces all saying the same thing: “And there we were, thinking he has no heart.”

  Merezhkovsky asked sternly for a dish and said the cherries should be washed.

  “Dmitry Sergeyevich,” I said sweetly. “It’s all right, I’m not frightened. There’s no cholera now.”

  “I know,” he said grimly. “But I’m still frightened.”

  He sat in the corner and, noisily spitting out the stones, ate every last cherry. It was so funny that those present were afraid to look at one another lest they burst out laughing.

  •

  I was preoccupied by this strange man for a long time. I kept looking for something in him and not finding it. I remembered “Sakya Muni”, Merezhkovsky’s poem about how the Buddha, the Sage of the Shakhya clan,[8] moved by the suffering of a lowly thief who had said to him “Lord of the World, you are wrong”, had bowed his crowned head to the ground. This hymn to humility—from the pen of Merezhkovsky!

  And then, one day not long before his death, after they had returned to Paris disappointed by their German patrons and with no money at all—they had even had to sell a gold pen some Italian writers had presented to them during Merezhkovsky’s Mussolini period[9]—the three of us were sitting together and Zinaida Nikolaevna remarked of someone, “Yes, people really do love him.”

  “Nonsense!” interrupted Merezhkovsky. “Absolute nonsense! No one loves. No one is loved.”

  There was something desperate behind this. These were not idle words. Merezhkovsky’s whole face had darkened. Dear God! What torments this man must have been going through in the black pit he inhabited . . . I felt fear for him, and pain.

  “Dmitry Sergeyevich! What makes you say that? It’s just that you don’t see people. You don’t really notice them.”

  “Nonsense. I do notice people.”

  I may be wrong, but in his words I had heard both longing and despair. I thought of his most recent poem, “O Loneliness, O Poverty”. And I thought of Gogol’s Khoma Brut. The dead sorceress’s coffin flying just above his head. It was terrifying.

  “Dmitry Sergeyevich! You truly don’t notice people. I know I’m always laughing at you, but really I love you.”

  It was as if, with these words, I were making the sign of the cross over myself.

  For a moment he seemed at a loss; then he recovered himself: “I think it’s my works you love—not me.”

  “No, Dmitry Sergeyevich, I love you, as a human being.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he turned and went slowly to his room. He came back and handed me a photograph of himself, with an affectionate inscription.

  I have this photograph still.

  1950

  Translated by Anne Marie Jackson

  ILYA REPIN

  I did not see Repin often. He lived in Finland and came only seldom to Petersburg.

  But one day Kaplan, from the publishing house “Dog Rose”,[1] came round with a letter from Repin. Repin very much liked my story “The Top”.[2] “It moved me to tears,” he wrote. And this had made him want to paint my portrait.

  This, of course, was a great honour for me. We agreed on a date and time, and Kaplan took me along in his car.

  It was winter. Cold. Snowstorms. All very miserable. With its squat dachas deep in snow, Kuokkala was not welcoming. The sky was also very low, even darker than the earth and breathing out cold. After Petersburg, with its loud voices, with its whistles and car horns, the village seemed very quiet. The snow lay in deep drifts and there could have been a bear beneath every one of them, fast asleep, sucking its paw.

  Repin greeted us warmly. He took us into his studio and showed us his latest work. Then we sat down for a late breakfast at his famous round table. The table had two levels. On the top level, which revolved, were all kinds of dishes; you moved it round and helped yourself to whatever you fancied. On the lower level were containers for the dirty plates and bowls. It was all very convenient, and fun—like having a picnic. The food was vegetarian, and there was a lot of variety. Some of our more serious eaters, though, would complain after a visit that they’d been given nothing but hay. In the railway station on the way back home, they’d go to the buffet and fill up on meat rissoles, which would by then have grown cold.

  After breakfast—work.

  Repin seated me on a little dais and then sat down below me. He was looking up at me, which seemed very strange. I’ve sat for a number of artists—Alexandr Yakovlev, Savely Sorin, Boris Grigoryev, Savely Schleifer[3] and many who are less well known—but no one has ever gone about it so strangely.

  He was using coloured pencils, which he didn’t do often. “It’ll be Paris style,” he said with a smile.

  He asked someone else who was there to read aloud “The Top”, the story of mine that had made such an impression on him. This made me think of Boris Kustodiev’s account of how, while he was painting his portrait of Nicholas II, the Tsar had read aloud one of my stories of village life. He had read well—and then he had asked if it was really true that the author was a lady.

  Repin’s finished portrait of me was something magically tender, unexpected, not at all like his usual, more forceful work.

  He promised to give it to me.
But I never received it. It was sent to an exhibition in America and, in Repin’s words, “it got stuck in customs”.

  I didn’t like to question him too insistently. “He simply doesn’t want to admit that he sold it,” people kept telling me.

  It would, in any case, have disappeared during the Revolution, as did all the other portraits of me, as did many beloved things without which I’d thought life would be hardly worth living.

  Years later, in Paris, I republished “The Top” in The Book of June, dedicating the story to Repin. I sent a copy of the book to the address I still had for him in Finland. He replied warmly, asking me to send him a few amateur photographs, just as they were, without any retouching. With these to prompt him, he’d be able to recreate the portrait from memory. At the bottom of the letter was a postscript from his daughter, saying that her father was very weak, hardly able to move about at all.

  I was touched by this thoughtfulness on Repin’s part, but I was slow to do as he asked. Eventually, however, I did—only to read in a newspaper, the very next day, that Repin had died.

  I shall remember this short, rather thin man as someone uncommonly polite and courteous. His manner was always unruffled and he never showed the least sign of irritation. In short: “A man from another age”.

  I’ve heard it said that, after pointing out the failings in a work by one of his weaker students, he would add, “Oh, if only I had your brush!”

  Even if he didn’t really say this, it’s easy to imagine him coming out with something similar. Repin was modest. People accustomed to praise and flattery usually speak a lot and don’t listen. Speak—rather than converse. Fyodor Chaliapin, Vlas Doroshevich and Leonid Andreyev all strode about the room and held forth. Repin would listen intently to the other person. He conversed.

  His wife Natalya Nordman-Severova was a committed vegetarian. She converted her husband. The revolving table was her idea too. When, overcome by jealousy, she left her husband, he remained loyal to vegetarianism. But shortly before his death, growing weaker and weaker, he ate a little curd cheese. This lifted his spirits. Then he decided to eat an egg. And that gave him the strength to get to his feet and even to do some work.[4]

  His last note to me read, “I’m waiting for your photos. I’m determined to do your portrait.”

  His handwriting was weak. He was not strong enough to paint a portrait.

  Not that I had ever really expected anything to come of all this. I’ve never been a collector, never been able to keep hold of things and not let them slip through my hands. When I’ve been asked by fortune tellers to spread out my palms, they always say, with a shake of the head, “No, with hands like that you’ll never be able to hold on to anything.”

  •

  There was also a portrait of me by Savely Schleifer. It too had its story.[5]

  Schleifer had portrayed me in a white tunic and he’d thrown a deep-blue veil over my head.

  I had a friend who particularly loved this portrait. He persuaded me to give it to him and he took it to his estate in the province of Kovno.[6] A true aesthete, close to Mikhail Kuzmin, he hung it in the place of honour and always stood a vase of flowers beneath it.

  In 1917 he heard that the peasants had looted his house and gone off with all his books and paintings. He hurried back to his estate to try to rescue his treasures.

  He managed to track down a few of them. In one hut he found my portrait, hanging in the icon corner beside Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker and the Iverskaya Mother of God. Thanks to the long white tunic, the blue veil and the vase of dried flowers, the woman who had taken this portrait had decided I was a saint and lit an icon lamp before me.

  A likely story . . .

  The palmists were right. I’ve never been able to hold on to anything. Neither portraits, nor poems dedicated to me, nor paintings I’ve been given, nor important letters from interesting people. Nothing at all.

  •

  There is a little more preserved in my memory, but even this is gradually, or even rather quickly, losing its meaning, fading, slipping away from me, wilting and dying.

  It’s sad to wander about the graveyard of my tired memory, where all hurts have been forgiven, where every sin has been more than atoned for, every riddle unriddled and twilight quietly cloaks the crosses, now no longer upright, of graves I once wept over.[7]

  Probably written 1950–52

  Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler

  LIST OF HISTORICAL FIGURES

  LEONID ANDREYEV (1871–1919): an acclaimed writer of short stories, plays and novels, one of the most important figures of Russian literature’s “Silver Age”.

  KONSTANTIN BALMONT (1867–1942): one of the founders of Russian Symbolism. He and Teffi’s older sister Mirra Lokhvitskaya were intensely—though probably platonically—emotionally involved during the last ten years of her life.

  DEMYAN BEDNY (1883–1945): a revolutionary poet and satirist. Bedny (a pseudonym) means “poor”.

  ANDREI BELY (1880–1934): a Symbolist poet and novelist, best known for his novel Petersburg.

  NIKOLAI BERDYAEV (1874–1948): a religious philosopher. A Marxist as a young man, he went on to adopt a position that has been described as Christian Existentialist. He was expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922.

  J.-WLADIMIR BIENSTOCK, né Vladimir Lvovitch Binshtock (1868–1933): a Russian-born writer and translator into French.

  ALEXANDER BOGDANOV (1873–1928): a revolutionary and cultural activist, the founder of the proletarian art movement Proletkult (1918–20).

  VALERY BRYUSOV (1873–1924): a prominent poet and critic, among the founders of Russian Symbolism. One of the few Symbolists to give his wholehearted support to the Soviet regime.

  SERGEI BULGAKOV (1871–1944): a theologian. Ordained into the priesthood soon after the Revolution, he was expelled from Russia along with other philosophers and religious thinkers in 1922.

  FYODOR CHALIAPIN (1873–1938): one of the most famous operatic basses of his day.

  DON-AMINADO, real name Aminodav Shpolyansky (1888–1957): a poet and satirist. Like Teffi, he wrote for New Satirikon and other pre-revolutionary journals. Like her, he emigrated to Paris, where he continued to publish poems, articles and stories.

  VLAS DOROSHEVICH (1864–1922): a journalist, editor and writer of short stories. Teffi devotes several pages of Memories to him.

  ANATOLY FARESOV (1852–1928): a member of an older generation of revolutionaries, the “Populist” movement of the 1860s and 1870s.

  DMITRY FILOSOFOV (1872–1940): a literary critic, religious thinker and political activist, co-founder and first literary editor of the illustrated journal Mir iskusstva (World of Art). Close to both Merezhkovsky and Gippius.

  ALEXANDER FINN-YENOTAEVSKY (1872–1943): a revolutionary who assumed the pseudonym Yenotaevsky after being exiled for two years to Yenotaevsk in the Arkhangelsk district.

  ZINAIDA NIKOLAEVNA GIPPIUS (1869–1945): a Symbolist poet. Along with her husband Dmitry Merezhkovsky, she hosted an important salon. Always flamboyant, she liked to shock both through her behaviour—insulting her guests and wearing male clothes—and through poems that she herself called “personal prayers” but which others saw as blasphemous. She wrote both under her own name and under several male pseudonyms; the best known was “Anton the Extreme”. After the Revolution, she and Merezhkovsky settled in Paris. “The Green Lamp”, a literary and philosophical society they founded, was attended by many of the most important émigré writers. Teffi ends a separate memoir of Gippius by telling how, after her death, she whispered over her coffin the words, “Friend whom I did not know for long, you did not want to be kind and warm. You wanted to be vicious. Because that is more vivid, isn’t it? As for the sweet tenderness that your soul loved in secret, you hid it in embarrassment from the eyes of others.”

  MAXIM GORKY (1868–1936): claimed by the Soviet regime as the father of Socialist Realism, Gorky published his first book, to great acclaim, in 1898. His subje
ct matter was drawn from the lives of the very lowest social strata. From 1905 until 1918 he was closely involved with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, living for much of this period in Capri. His fame as a writer was worldwide and he was able to provide the Bolsheviks with substantial financial support. In 1918, however, he attacked Lenin and the Soviet regime as criminal and tyrannical; for most of the period from 1921 until 1928 he once again lived in exile. In 1932 he accepted a personal invitation from Stalin to return to the Soviet Union. There he became a (possibly reluctant) cultural figurehead for the Soviet regime.

  SERGEI GUSEV (1874–1933): a member of the Bolshevik faction from its inception in 1903.

  ALEXANDER IZMAILOV (1873–1921): a journalist and literary critic.

  LEV KAMENEV (1883–1936): one of the most important of Lenin’s colleagues. A member of the Central Committee during the 1920s, he was shot in 1936, after being sentenced in the first of the Moscow Show Trials.

  YEVTIKHY KARPOV (1857–1926): a playwright and theatre director.

  MIKHAIL KATKOV (1818–87): a notoriously reactionary journalist.

  ALEXANDER KERENSKY (1881–1970): a leading member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (the SRs); prime minister of the Provisional Government from 8th July until 25th October 1917.

  ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI (1872–1952): a Bolshevik from 1914, famous for her radical views on marriage and sexuality.

  ALEXANDER KUGEL (1864–1928): a theatre critic who in 1908 co-founded The Crooked Mirror, a theatre that specialized in parodies and put on two of Teffi’s plays.

  ALEXANDER KUPRIN (1870–1938): a popular writer of short stories and novels.

  BORIS KUSTODIEV (1878–1927): a painter and stage designer. His portrait of Nicholas II, painted in 1915, can be seen in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg.