“There are writers who muddy their own water, to make it seem deeper.  Teffi could not be more different: the water is entirely transparent, yet the bottom is barely visible.”  –Georgy Adamovich

The Pushkin Club invites you to a reading by Robert Chandler celebrating the life and work of Teffi. This is an online-only event.

Nadezdha Lokhvitskaya – the writer we now know as Teffi – was born on 21 May 1872.  This year sees the 150th anniversary of her birth and the 80th anniversary of her death in Paris on 6 October 1952.  Originally Robert Chandler had intended to celebrate these dates by reading from Other Worlds, a recently published collection of stories foregrounding her witty and paradoxical treatment of Russian folk religious beliefs.  Instead, however, he will read from Memories, her account of her last journey across Russia and Ukraine in the early days of the Russian Civil War.  She travelled from Moscow, via Kyiv and Odesa, to the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk – and then by ship to Istanbul.  Memories is very personal; Teffi writes about her own thoughts and feelings and the people she met.  At the same time, she had an acute awareness of the political currents swirling around her, many of which have now resurfaced.  Her ability to fuse comedy and tragedy in a single paragraph – even in a single sentence – is astonishing.  Here she is, writing about her last days in Moscow:

“It was as if we were living in the tale about Gorynych, the dragon who required a yearly tribute of twelve fair maidens and twelve young men. One might well wonder how the people in this tale could have carried on, how they could have lived with the knowledge that a dragon would soon be devouring the finest of their children. During those terrible last days in Moscow, however, we realized that Gorynych’s vassals had also probably been rushing from theatre to theatre or hurrying to buy themselves something they could make a coat or a dress from. There is nowhere a human being cannot live. With my own eyes I have seen sailors taking a man out onto the ice in order to shoot him – and I have seen the condemned man hopping over puddles to keep his feet dry and turning up his collar to shield his chest from the wind. Those few steps were the last steps he would take in his life and he instinctively wanted to make them as comfortable as possible. We were no different. We bought ourselves some ‘last scraps’ of fabric. We listened for the last time to the last operetta and the last exquisitely erotic verses. What did it matter whether the verses were good or terrible? All that mattered was not to know, not to be conscious, not to be aware that we were being taken out onto the ice.”

Robert Chandler’s translations from Russian, mostly for NYRB Classics, include works by Alexander Pushkin and Nikolay Leskov; several collections of stories and memoirs by Teffi; and novels and stories by Vasily Grossman, Andrey Platonov and Hamid Ismailov. He is the editor and main translator of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov. Together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, he has co-edited The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. He has also translated selections of Sappho and Apollinaire. He runs regular translation workshops in London and teaches for an annual literary translation summer school, currently titled BRISTOL TRANSLATES. His most recent publication is Pushkin’s Peter the Great’s African and his next will be Vasily Grossman’s The People Immortal, both co-translated with his wife Elizabeth.