Or to put it more simply: One fine morning people come and assure you, in the most impassioned of tones, that you have absolutely nothing to worry about, your life is really not in any danger. And your previous sense of peace and calm is lost forever.
“I believe you. I know full well that I’m not in any danger. But why do you have to keep telling me that? Hmm…”
“The Bolsheviks aren’t coming. It won’t be allowed. Have you got a visa?”
Perhaps this is true—the Bolsheviks won’t come, and their coming is simply not possible. But in that corner of your consciousness, in that region of your brain that deals with the intricacies of obtaining foreign passports, the Bolsheviks have already taken over. They have been allowed into the city, they are making themselves at home here, and they are doing as they please with you. And fate offers you a last breakfast. Le dernier déjeuner. Clubs and restaurants are packed to bursting. People are guzzling chicken feet at eighty roubles each. People are blowing their “last odd million” in games of chemin de fer. Bellies bulging, lifeless eyes, and a one-way visa to the island of Krakatakata (wherever that may be). And you’re not allowed to stop anywhere en route.
Cold dreary days. Apocalyptic evenings.
In the evening people gather together, wearing hats and fur coats. With pale lips, their breath coming in clouds, they repeat, “The Bolsheviks, of course, aren’t coming. A visa—must get hold of some kind of visa.”
And they throw the last chair into the stove, after taking turns to sit on it for a minute by way of farewell.
This too is a kind of dernier déjeuner.
Cold days.
But if one morning the sun happens to leap up into the faded sky—a sky that is exhausted from waiting for spring—what absurd pictures we will see. These pictures are gloomy and sinister; they are not pictures fit for the sun.
The owner of a sugar refinery has walked out of a gaming house. He has been playing cards with abandon—and by morning he has lost two and a half million. By any standards that is quite a sum. But he has promised that by tomorrow he’ll come up with some more money, to win back his losses.
The sun hurts the man’s eyes, which are weary from his sleepless night. He squints, unable for a moment to take in a curious little scene being acted out right there in front of him.
On the pavement a man is poking about in a hole dug for a tree. Evidently, a former actor—you can tell from the stubble on a face that has now gone some time without a shave. The skin hangs from his cheeks in deep folds, pulling down the corners of his mouth. The actor is wearing only a light summer coat, and over it—like a beggar king—a brownish-black threadbare blanket.
The actor is engaged in a serious task. He is picking through discarded nut shells. Searching for a mistakenly spat-out kernel. Ah! He seems to have found something. He lifts this something up to his face and, slightly squinting, with a quick monkey-like movement of both hands, picks out a fragment of nut. The owner of the sugar refinery, screwing up his tired eyes, watches all this for a few seconds, calmly and without embarrassment, as one might observe a monkey unwrapping a sweet. The actor looks up, also only for an instant. Then he returns to his task. Equally calmly and without embarrassment, like a monkey being watched by some other species of wild animal.
He carries on with his dernier déjeuner.
“Hey, sun! Put those beams of yours away. Nothing worth gawping at here!”And what’s all this about “psychological comas”? It’s nothing of the kind.
People are just carrying on with their lives, living the way they have always lived, as is their human nature.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
MEMORIES was first published, in installments, between December 1928 and January 1930, in Paris, in the Russian-language newspaper Vozrozhdenie. Its first readers were Russian émigrés. Nearly all were from the same cultural world as Teffi and many had been through similar experiences during their last months in Russia. I have provided endnotes, to the best of my ability, to fill in the cultural and political references that Teffi could take for granted in her original readership. What I have not done is to fill in the strictly personal details that Teffi has left vague or purposely obscured. Teffi was uncommonly reticent about her personal life, and I have chosen to respect this. But I wholeheartedly encourage anyone wanting to know more to turn to Edythe Haber’s forthcoming biography.
Teffi is now widely read in Russia—new editions of her best-known stories come out almost yearly—but she still receives little scholarly attention. Probably because of her lack of pretense, she remains underestimated. In 1931, in a review of a new collection of Teffi’s short stories, the Russian émigré poet Georgy Adamovich wrote, “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.” These words are still more apt with regard to Memories, an elegant and carefully composed work of art that appears, on first reading, to have been thrown together casually and spontaneously.
In essence, Memories is a series of goodbyes: to Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Russia itself; to friends—some who died and some who stayed in Soviet Russia; to the Russian theater; and to Russia’s two most important religious centers. Each of these goodbyes is in its distinct emotional register. Teffi’s departure from Moscow is solemn; her departure from Odessa is farcical; her final departure on the boat to Constantinople is deeply sad. Teffi avoids repetition, but she makes skilful use of echoes and symmetries. Most poignant of all, perhaps, is the contrast between her account of her last public reading in Soviet Russia—in a “Club of Enlightenment” packed with Red Army soldiers and Cheka officers draped in bullet belts—and her account near the end of the memoir of an evening in a Yekaterinodar theater where the glittering audience includes the commander-in-chief of the White Army. The former ends with a few well-wishers in the audience—women who appear “infinitely weary” and “hopelessly sad”—calling out to Teffi “Sweetheart! We love you! God grant you get out of here soon!” The evening in Yekaterinodar ends with Teffi joining in excited calls for the author to go out onstage, momentarily forgetting that she is herself the author of the plays just performed. The nature of authorship—the extent to which anyone is in control of their own life and the extent to which an artist does, or does not, have authority over their own creations—is another of Teffi’s leitmotifs in Memories.
The final chapter is astonishing; shortly before leaving Russia, Teffi imagines saying goodbye to life itself. Standing at dawn beneath the hilltop gallows where an anarchist known as “Ksenya G” was hanged by the Whites, she imagines Ksenya’s last minutes. Ksenya was “bold, gay, young, and beautiful.” She was “always chic”; she was independent-minded. She has much in common with Teffi herself, and Teffi knows this. This scene may, amongst other things, serve as a source of bleak comfort, a reminder to Teffi that there are still worse fates than losing one’s country. Had Teffi chosen to stay, she too might well have been executed.
Like many of the greatest Russian prose writers of the last century—Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrey Platonov, and Varlam Shalamov, among others—Teffi began her literary career as a poet. Like these other writers—with the possible exception of Shalamov—she is more truly a poet in her prose than in her verse. She writes precisely, colloquially and with delicate modulations of tone. There are subtle echoes and symmetries not only in the book’s overall structure, but also at the level of individual chapters, paragraphs, and even sentences. Irony, tragedy, absurdity, and high spirits interweave, sometimes undercutting one another, sometimes reinforcing one another. Behind every sentence the reader can sense a living voice; the intonation of every phrase can be clearly heard.