“He’s arrested, arrested. It’s not known where…”
“They’ve been executed, both of them…”
“It’s said they were tortured… shhh… Somebody’s listening in.” And suddenly his face adopts an unnatural, carefree expression and his trembling lips whistle “Pretty Girls of the Cabaret.”[25]
In May 1918, Teffi left hungry Petrograd for Moscow; the theater magazine Rampa i zhizn’ (Footlights and Life) noted her delight with “Moscow bread.”[26] She probably came to Moscow that spring to attend rehearsals of Catherine the Great, an operetta she co-wrote with the comic poet Lolo (L. G. Munshtein, c. 1866–1947), which opened with great success in August. Another and more urgent reason for her departure from Petrograd, however, might have been a troubling incident that took place at the very beginning of 1918: An actress was arrested after a New Year’s Day performance of works by Teffi and Averchenko, and only after a lengthy interrogation and a warning that “she must not dare to earn her bread through slander of the people’s government,” was she let go.[27] (In Memories Teffi reimagines this incident, also moving it to a later date.)
By September 1918, life in Moscow was also growing more dangerous. In contrast to Petersburg, as Teffi later wrote from Kiev, Moscow was “still alive,” although just barely: “Mad motorcars race, with a whistle and a whoop. Rifle shots enliven the black silence of nocturnal streets. Moscow is being robbed and stabbed. It is still alive, still protesting, jerking its legs and pressing a foreign passport to its heart.”[28] This was the situation confronting Teffi at the beginning of Memories.
In the title piece to Teffi’s 1927 book, The Small Town (the title referring to the Russian colony within the larger Parisian metropolis), she expresses her disdain for émigré memoir writers. Aside from the usual categories of men and women, she writes, the town’s population includes “ministers and generals,” who spend their time amassing debts and writing memoirs.[29] “The memoirs,” she adds, “were written to glorify their own name and to disgrace their comrades in arms. The difference among the memoirs consisted in the fact that some were written by hand and others on a typewriter.”[30]
In the note that introduces her own Memories, Teffi signals at once that she has written a very different kind of book—one in which there are no heroes, no specific political line, no lofty conclusions. Her subjects instead are “ordinary unhistorical people who struck her as amusing or interesting.”[31] The word “amusing” might at first seem jarring, given her grim subject matter, but in Teffi’s view the funny and the tragic are not mutually exclusive. She writes in Memories, in a remark that could characterize her comic vision as a whole: “But life in Odessa soon began to pall. A joke is not so funny when you’re living inside it. It begins to seem more like a tragedy.” A number of critics noted that the humor only accentuated the horror. Mikhail Tsetlin, for example, wrote: “The laughter and bitterness in Teffi’s book are so funny, and thereby it [the book] achieves a double impression: what nonsense and what sadness and what horror!”[32]
The author of Memories indeed makes no claim of heroism, warns us that she does not consider herself any more interesting than the others. For the most part Teffi portrays herself (as she often does in her writings) as a quite ordinary woman—frivolous, of limited understanding, guided more by emotions and naïve ideals than by abstract principles. But when need be she drops the mask, and the reader views events through her penetrating gaze. The closest thing to a hero in Teffi’s dark comedy is the unlikely figure of “pseudonym Gooskin,” her “impresario,” who persuaded her to leave Moscow for a time and go on a reading tour of still Bolshevik-free Ukraine. An Odessan Jew whose non-sequiturs and mangling of the Russian language are a constant source of humor, Gooskin bears none of the external attributes of the hero, but during the treacherous trip from Moscow through the lawless western reaches of Russia it is his wiliness—his ability to outsmart the antagonist and lay low if necessary—that saves Teffi and her companions time and again.
Teffi parts ways with Gooskin in Kiev, and the remainder of the book traces her path down the map of the former Russian Empire, with stops in Odessa, Novorossiisk, Yekaterinodar. Everywhere she went she witnessed a similar dynamic: refugees like herself trying to rebuild cultural and social structures destroyed by revolution only to find them once again toppled by the forces of civil war. In Kiev, still occupied by the Germans in accordance with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Teffi encountered many literary and theatrical colleagues who, like herself, had fled from Bolshevik Russia and were now trying feverishly to start up theaters, newspapers, and other cultural institutions. At first it seemed like a “festival,” she writes, but the second impression was of “a station waiting room, just before the final whistle.” When the Germans, defeated in the World War, left in December 1918, and, after the brief rule of Ukrainian nationalists, the Bolsheviks began their approach in January 1919, the refugees fled further.
Many went to Odessa—Teffi among them. The new arrivals resumed their feverish social life, gambling and drinking through the night, while the eternally optimistic writers and journalists again set about starting a newspaper. The forces of destruction, however—at first taking the form of the notorious Odessan gangsters (made famous by Isaac Babel)—were never far below the surface. And when in April the Bolsheviks began their incursion, people resumed their exodus, Teffi barely escaping on a rickety ship, the Shilka, on which she hoped to sail to Vladivostok and from there to return home.
While on the ship Teffi witnessed the dissolution of her old world on a more individual level. A furnace stoker with whom she struck up a conversation on the deck one night revealed that he was in disguise—that he was actually a Petersburg youth who had visited her apartment, where they “talked about stones, about a yellow sapphire.” Since then his entire family had perished and now he planned to go to Odessa to fight the Bolsheviks. Teffi remembers the evenings in Petersburg: “Languid, high-strung ladies, sophisticated young men. A table adorned with white lilac. A conversation about a yellow sapphire…” Then she imagines the execution awaiting this boy, who will “rest his weary shoulders against the stone wall of a black cellar and close his eyes…” If the stoker marks the demise of the aestheticized pre-revolutionary artistic world, a group of young officers who boarded the Shilka in the Crimean city of Sevastopol embodies the disappearance of the aristocratic military culture: “They were handsome and smart and they chatted away merrily, casually coming out with the odd word of French and singing French songs with perfect accents.” Yet they were soon to be mowed down in battle, Teffi remarks, “to meet their death with courage and grace.”
31
“Ot avtora,”