Teffi: A Life of Letters and Laughter, by Edythe Haber
EDWARD CHARLTON-JONES Teffi: A Life of Letters and of Laughter By Edythe Haber I B Tauris £20
‘How do people defend themselves?’ asked Teffi in her exile. ‘Youth, beauty, money and success. Each person should have these four pistols. If they don’t, they have to pretend they do.’
Teffi would know. It was 1937 and, by then in her mid-sixties, she could look back on four decades marked by struggle of one form or another. First, the decision to leave a husband and three children on a sleepy steppe estate so she could pursue a literary career in St Petersburg. Next, the effort to make her living as a humourist and writer, battling her way to the peak of her profession and numbering the last tsar and Lenin among her readers. Then the turbulence of the 1917 revolution, an escape across the Black Sea to Constantinople and restarting from nothing in interwar Paris.
Nonetheless, it is Teffi’s puckish wit and formidable spirit that defines Edythe Haber’s engaging biography as much as her travails.
Born Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, she rose to prominence as a satirist in the first years of the 20th century. Her talents suited the short-form pieces then in vogue in the Russian capital: comic sketches or ‘feuilletons’, which she dashed off in one go for the newspapers, short stories and one-act theatrical ‘miniatures’ (she found the thought of a three-act play ‘simply disgusting’). Her work stood out for its brisk, clever dialogue, tragicomic themes and stinging caricatures taking aim at middle-class
vanities and posturing poets. To make Russians laugh, she felt, a piece ‘should be sharp and should wound someone, so that, in its peals and vibrations, drops of blood be felt’.
Teffi soon became a popular sensation in Russia. There were Teffi perfumes and Teffi sweets. She held a well-attended salon called Blue Tuesdays, where she dazzled with her repartee. Rasputin tried to seduce her with a heavy touch on the shoulder (one of his favourite tactics), but the trick backfired and he went into convulsions; later he wrote out one of his poems for her with the inscription ‘To Nadezhda. God is Love. Love. God will forgive. Grigory.’
She found life under the Bolsheviks intolerable, dismissing Lenin and his followers as ‘Satanic salad’. She left Russia for good shortly after the revolution and made her way to Paris
with thousands of her compatriots – there were as many as 200,000 ‘Russian Parisians’ by 1930, according to one contemporary survey.
There she began to write in Russian again. A favourite subject was poking fun at other Russians reinventing themselves, like the prattling seamstress in one of her stories who announces herself as ‘Madame Elise d’ivanoff’, purveyor of ‘fantaisies’. She also offered tongue-in-cheek advice to those who, like her, were forced to rub shoulders with ‘Sister Poverty’: above all, never admit that you cannot afford to go to the opera or theatre. ‘Instead, you should raise everything to a higher plane and declare, “The French don’t even understand Tchaikovsky,” or “Paquin is repeating himself!”’
Haber has pulled off a difficult job with great skill in writing Teffi’s
life story. Teffi can be unreliable in her letters, and she didn’t regularly keep a diary. Haber has overcome these obstacles by drawing on contemporary correspondence and memoirs scattered across Russia, western Europe and America. Occasionally some of the detail feels unnecessary, perhaps a reflection of the fact that this is the first life of Teffi in English, but this does not substantially impede the flow of the book.
Haber quotes astutely from Teffi’s work, much of which is still untranslated and unpublished since first appearing in print, and has a keen ear for her word-games and zingers; Teffi’s wit remains unputdownable.
For years, Russian émigré literature was overlooked by English readers in favour of Soviet writing. That is now changing, and Teffi is at last receiving the attention she deserves: Haber follows Pushkin Press’s recent publication of Teffi’s selected fiction and non-fiction, as well as the standalone Memories (2016), a caustically funny account of her journey into exile, for which Haber wrote the introduction. She features prominently, too, in Penguin’s excellent collection Russian Émigré Short Stories (2017).
Though she’s primarily remembered as a comic writer, Teffi’s tone grew darker as it became increasingly clear that there could be no return to Soviet Russia. Russian émigrés no longer belonged anywhere, she wrote, but sat patiently listening for death, ‘as if… in the waiting room of a dentist’.
Yet, to the end, she knew how to put on a show. Her daughter recalled staying with her near-destitute mother in her later years. Teffi would come home in the evenings, inexplicably enveloped in the scent of Mitsouko by Guerlain, a gift for her daughter in her hands. ‘To my objections,’ the daughter wrote, ‘she invariably answered, “I like to look at a person who is pleased.”’