Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others & Me: the Best of Teffi

Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: the Best of Teffi
trans. from the Russian by
Anne Marie Jackson, Rose France & Elizabeth Chandler
NY: NYRB, 2016
226 p.

This is a wonderful collection of essays by Teffi, pseudonym of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, a Russian writer who lived as an exile in Paris after the Bolshevik Revolution. Her writing style is light, humorous, and yet also deep and incisive. 

The book is broken up into four sections: How I Live and Work; Staging Posts; Heady Days: Revolutions and Civil Wars; and Artists Remembered. 

Each has a handful of essays, and there are all fascinating. Teffi introduces herself and her writing career with a background on her family upbringing and her early attempts at publication. These are a great foundation for understanding her later interactions with other writers and famous residents of Moscow. 

The second section is a series of her popular essays about her life in Russia; these pieces were interesting and charmingly written. But the strongest part of the book, at least for this reader, were here essays about her encounters with Lenin (a cunning man with no interest in beauty or culture); with Tolstoy (she met him as a young 13 yr old as was so overcome she couldn't speak, just asked for an autograph and left, embarrassed); and Rasputin. Of course Rasputin still holds a fascination for modern day readers, nearly as strong as when he was alive and manipulating the Russian court. Teffi sees right through him and thinks him a rather pathetic and dirty man -- she states that he was a mesmerist and used touch to convince people of his instructions. And he was a womanizer; he tries to tell Teffi that she will come to him that week, touching her shoulder, but she says no she won't, and he recoils. She is convinced it is because his mesmeric power, having been rejected, bounces back at him painfully. It's a fascinating essay, drawing a picture of this strangely influential oddball in the pre-Revolution days. He was so polarizing that she says there were signs in people's houses when you went to dinner stating "In this house, we don't talk about Rasputin". 

Part Three of the book contains the essay about Rasputin, and other revolutionary topics. Here we find her most serious and darkest essay, The Gadarene Swine, which is not leavened by her usual sarcasm or irony, rather it's a fully depressing look at society in turmoil. 

The final section of the book looks at other writers -- here is her essay on meeting Tolstoy -- and the other established authors she knew well. 

All together it gives a picture of the life of a literary woman who was well connected and committed to the arts, and if not for the upheaval of her society she probably would have ended up as one of the big names of her era in a traditional sense. But her observing eye took on all that was around her and so we can see these years of revolution from the inside. 

I'll definitely be looking for her book Memories: from Moscow to the Black Sea, which is supposed to be even better.