Book review: Teffi’s Memories tell of the Russian white flight and fight to survive

Translated into English for the first time, Teffi's account of the flight of Russian emigres still resonates a century on.

The 1917 Russian Revolution and Civil War forced millions to flee their homeland, including writer Teffi. Above, a nurse and refugees at a camp in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1922. Bettman / Corbis / Getty Images
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A hundred years ago, Teffi (the nom de plume of Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaya) was one of Russia’s most popular and admired writers. The breadth of her talent – Symbolist poems, satirical sketches, feuilletons, stories and even songs – was equalled only by that of her audience: as her biographer Edythe Haber explains in the introduction to this beautiful new edition of what has remained Teffi’s most famous work, she was famously read by “both Russias”, from Nikolai II to Vladimir Lenin.

Although born into a “distinguished” St Petersburg family, like many Russian intellectuals Teffi had been a supporter of the 1905 Russian Revolution. However, as the civil war that broke out after the October Revolution in 1917 waged across the country, she found herself joining the droves forced to flee their homeland.

Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea tells the story of her flight and the people she met along the way as she travelled across Russia and Ukraine, before boarding a boat to Istanbul. After which, she eventually settled in Paris in 1920, where she lived until her death in 1952 at the age of 80. Memories originally appeared in serialised form between 1928 and 1930.

Given the refugee crisis that dominates Europe today, Pushkin Press’s publication of this volume – translated into English for the first time – could not be timelier.

To be brought face-to-face with the horrific repetitions of history has a particularly sobering effect; to be reminded that against all odds life goes on. The Armenian refugees Teffi encounters in Novorossiysk, who “bickered, laughed, wandered through the camp to visit one another, and smacked their children. Some were even selling dried fish and pressed mutton […] No one grumbled, worried, or asked too many questions. They accepted their present life as something quite normal” illustrate this. But also, it doesn’t – a sadistic colonel, who saw his wife and children tortured to death, now enacts the same punishment on his prisoners.

“He’s insane,” one man opines to another. “No, he isn’t,” the other replies. “For him, what he’s doing is entirely normal. You see, after all he’s been through, it would be very, very strange if he were to act in a more ordinary way. That really would be insane. There’s a limit to what the soul can take, to what human reason can endure. And that’s as it should be.”

It’s this unflinching eye for the details of the lives of others, combined with her talent as a dialogist that transforms what could have been a memoir the like of a delicate charcoal study of a lone figure, into a grand oil painting of a larger society in turmoil: “All of us who were leaving felt a great deal of sorrow. There was a sorrow we all shared, and then we each had our own individual sorrow.”

And though distinctly of its period, the passage of time has done little to diminish either the pathos of the stories, or the ingenuity of Teffi’s prose (helped, no doubt, by the expert translation skills of Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg).

An obvious comparison can be drawn with the works of Stefan Zweig, the Austrian author who wrote so eloquently about the end of a grand epoch of European civilization in the run up to the Second World War, though Teffi’s particular marriage of solemnity, nostalgia and sadness with episodes of highly entertaining, albeit often tragic, all too human farce is a trait distinctly her own. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the antics of the impossibly cosseted upper classes: Teffi and her fellow passengers on a ship swabbing the decks and preparing food while wearing “colourful shawls, ball gowns, satin slippers”, and elegantly dressed men in smart suits humping coal, all caught in the catch-22 of their only means of escaping the Reds involving an embrace of the precise model of the society they’re all running away from.

“Hire someone! Do whatever is necessary!” rails one nobleman, indignant at being asked to do his bit. “If you prefer all this socialist nonsense and labour for everyone, then what are you doing on this ship? Go ashore and join your Bolshevik comrades.”

Lucy Scholes is a freelance reviewer based in London.