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Gangbare naam: Teffi
Officiële naam: Lokhvitskaya, Nadezhda Alexandrovna
Pseudoniemen en naamsvarianten: Buchinskaya, Nadezhda Alexandrovna
Teffi, N. A.
Geboortedatum: 1872-05-21
Overlijdensdatum: 1952-10-06
Graflocatie: Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery, Paris, France
Geslacht: female
Nationaliteit: Russia
Geboorteplaats: St. Petersburg, Russian Empire
Plaats van overlijden: Paris, France
Woonplaatsen: St Petersburg, Russian Empire
Paris, France
Beroepen: writer
short story writer
poet
playwright
novelist
memoirist
Korte biografie: Teffi was the pen name of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, born into a gentry family active in the St. Petersburg intelligentsia. Her sister Mirra Lokhvitskaya also became a notable Russian poet. At about age 18, Nadezhda married Wladyslav Buczynski, a Polish-born lawyer with whom she had three children, but the union was unhappy. After 10 years, she left her husband and children on their country estate and returned to St. Petersburg, where she became a successful writer. She became so celebrated that candies and perfume were named after her. During a period of radical fervor after the 1905 Revolution, she contributed to the first Bolshevik journal, The New Life, whose editorial board included Maxim Gorky and Zinaida Gippius. She also wrote for the Satiricon magazine and the popular journal Russkoye Slovo (Russian Word). She first used the pseudonym "Teffi" in 1907 with the publication of her one-act play The Woman Question. Teffi grew to hate the Bolsheviks because she believed they had no respect for culture, and had to leave St. Petersburg after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Eventually, she settled in Paris, where she contributed her work to Russian-language newspapers. She also published several book-length collections of short stories and poems, a volume of memoirs entitled Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (serialized 1928-1930), and her only novel, An Adventure Novel (1932).

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Subtly Worded and other stories, by Teffi in Fans of Russian authors (april 2016)

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Memories : from Moscow to the Black Sea door Teffi

The popular playwright and comic writer describes her last months in Russia and Ukraine during the chaotic aftermath of the Revolution, as she leaves Moscow together with other theatre people to find work first in Kyiv and then in Odesa and other cities on the Black Sea before she is finally obliged to go into exile. Writing some ten years after the event, she gives us a very clear sense of the confusing reality of living through the collapse of the world you’ve lived in all your life, and the difficulty of persuading yourself that this is really happening and won’t all magically be put right tomorrow.

Without ever being unnecessarily sentimental, the book is also an eloquent farewell to the pre-war arts scene in Moscow and Petersburg, and a memorial to all the many friends she lost during the Revolution and Civil War.… (meer)

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thorold | 6 andere besprekingen | Jul 28, 2023 |

Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints… door Teffi

These stories span the career of Teffi and share a feeling for the experience of religion.

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jwhenderson | Jan 13, 2023 |

Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (New York… door Teffi

I had read so many books translated from Russian, but somehow no books by women, which seemed ridiculous. When I set out to remedy that, Teffi was one of those names that I ran into, over and over.

I loved this just like multiple people told me I would. There are a few odd/sour notes when describing people of different races, and Teffi's fame as a writer certainly cushions her experiences, but this memoir of being a refugee in a time of upheaval bears some uncomfortably timely observations.

The constant guessing is what feels most exhausting to imagine. Guessing where it is safe to flee to. Guessing when it is time to pack up once again. The scarcity of information and the constant quest for more. Never knowing if each exile is permanent, if you will ever see any of these series of homes again.

I need to keep an eye out for more of her writing.… (meer)

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greeniezona | 6 andere besprekingen | Oct 1, 2022 |

Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi door Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya

Sometimes when you read a book, the author's personality shines through so strongly that convinced you would hit it off immediately, you wish you could somehow meet. So it was with this collection of writings by Teffi.

Probably such a meeting would be as humiliating as the one the thirteen year old Teffi had with Tolstoy. Recounted in the short story "My First Tolstoy", (1920), Teffi captures perfectly the awkwardness of such a meeting when everything you pictured saying and doing condenses into the briefest of encounters. How else could it be when you plan to ask the great author to save Prince Andrei?

While it's easy to relate to the stories from childhood, seeing yourself in the anecdotes, it's a completely different matter with "Rasputin". Written in 1924, Teffi's encounters with Rasputin are still fresh enough in memory to enable her to convey a chilling picture of a sexual predator, a 'sorcerer' as she describes him, a man who has asked particularly to meet her. Reading of his murder, she remembers his prediction:

...there's one thing they don't know: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia.
Remember me then! Remember me!

She did.

Much of Teffi's fame in Russia was as a satirist. Satire usually has a short shelf life. However, reminiscences such as "New Life", recalling the politics of the Petersburg newspaper where she worked for awhile, are just as relevant to any office setting today, and still inspire a chuckle.

Teffi left Russian in 1919, just after writing "The Gadarene Swine", a devastating critique of the Whites. She didn't fully realize at the time that she would never return. Perhaps saddest of all are her reflections written in exile, such as "Ilya Repin", a sketch of a celebrated Russian artist living in Finland. His early portrait of her had disappeared, probably to the US. She wrote in 1951, a year before she died

I've never been able to hold on to anything. Neither portraits, nor poems dedicated to me, nor paintings I've been given, nor 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 atoned for, every riddle unriddled and twilight quietly cloaks the crosses, now no longer upright, of graves I once wept over.

… (meer)

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SassyLassy | 2 andere besprekingen | Oct 17, 2020 |

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