I was touched by this thoughtfulness on Repin’s part, but I was slow to do as he asked. Eventually, however, I did—only to read in a newspaper, the very next day, that Repin had died.
I shall remember this short, rather thin man as someone uncommonly polite and courteous. His manner was always unruffled and he never showed the least sign of irritation. In short: “A man from another age”.
I’ve heard it said that, after pointing out the failings in a work by one of his weaker students, he would add, “Oh, if only I had your brush!”
Even if he didn’t really say this, it’s easy to imagine him coming out with something similar. Repin was modest. People accustomed to praise and flattery usually speak a lot and don’t listen. Speak—rather than converse. Fyodor Chaliapin, Vlas Doroshevich and Leonid Andreyev all strode about the room and held forth. Repin would listen intently to the other person. He conversed.
His wife Natalya Nordman-Severova was a committed vegetarian. She converted her husband. The revolving table was her idea too. When, overcome by jealousy, she left her husband, he remained loyal to vegetarianism. But shortly before his death, growing weaker and weaker, he ate a little curd cheese. This lifted his spirits. Then he decided to eat an egg. And that gave him the strength to get to his feet and even to do some work.[4]
His last note to me read, “I’m waiting for your photos. I’m determined to do your portrait.”
His handwriting was weak. He was not strong enough to paint a portrait.
Not that I had ever really expected anything to come of all this. I’ve never been a collector, never been able to keep hold of things and not let them slip through my hands. When I’ve been asked by fortune tellers to spread out my palms, they always say, with a shake of the head, “No, with hands like that you’ll never be able to hold on to anything.”
There was also a portrait of me by Savely Schleifer. It too had its story.[5]
Schleifer had portrayed me in a white tunic and he’d thrown a deep-blue veil over my head.
I had a friend who particularly loved this portrait. He persuaded me to give it to him and he took it to his estate in the province of Kovno.[6] A true aesthete, close to Mikhail Kuzmin, he hung it in the place of honour and always stood a vase of flowers beneath it.
In 1917 he heard that the peasants had looted his house and gone off with all his books and paintings. He hurried back to his estate to try to rescue his treasures.
He managed to track down a few of them. In one hut he found my portrait, hanging in the icon corner beside Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker and the Iverskaya Mother of God. Thanks to the long white tunic, the blue veil and the vase of dried flowers, the woman who had taken this portrait had decided I was a saint and lit an icon lamp before me.
A likely story…
The palmists were right. I’ve never been able to hold on to anything. Neither portraits, nor poems dedicated to me, nor paintings I’ve been given, nor important 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 more than atoned for, every riddle unriddled and twilight quietly cloaks the crosses, now no longer upright, of graves I once wept over.[7]
LIST OF HISTORICAL FIGURES
LEONID ANDREYEV (1871–1919): an acclaimed writer of short stories, plays and novels, one of the most important figures of Russian literature’s “Silver Age”.
KONSTANTIN BALMONT (1867–1942): one of the founders of Russian Symbolism. He and Teffi’s older sister Mirra Lokhvitskaya were intensely—though probably platonically—emotionally involved during the last ten years of her life.
DEMYAN BEDNY (1883–1945): a revolutionary poet and satirist. Bedny (a pseudonym) means “poor”.
ANDREI BELY (1880–1934): a Symbolist poet and novelist, best known for his novel Petersburg.
NIKOLAI BERDYAEV (1874–1948): a religious philosopher. A Marxist as a young man, he went on to adopt a position that has been described as Christian Existentialist. He was expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922.
J.-WLADIMIR BIENSTOCK, né Vladimir Lvovitch Binshtock (1868–1933): a Russian-born writer and translator into French.
ALEXANDER BOGDANOV (1873–1928): a revolutionary and cultural activist, the founder of the proletarian art movement Proletkult (1918–20).
VALERY BRYUSOV (1873–1924): a prominent poet and critic, among the founders of Russian Symbolism. One of the few Symbolists to give his wholehearted support to the Soviet regime.
SERGEI BULGAKOV (1871–1944): a theologian. Ordained into the priesthood soon after the Revolution, he was expelled from Russia along with other philosophers and religious thinkers in 1922.
FYODOR CHALIAPIN (1873–1938): one of the most famous operatic basses of his day.
DON-AMINADO, real name Aminodav Shpolyansky (1888–1957): a poet and satirist. Like Teffi, he wrote for New Satirikon and other pre-revolutionary journals. Like her, he emigrated to Paris, where he continued to publish poems, articles and stories.
VLAS DOROSHEVICH (1864–1922): a journalist, editor and writer of short stories. Teffi devotes several pages of Memories to him.
ANATOLY FARESOV (1852–1928): a member of an older generation of revolutionaries, the “Populist” movement of the 1860s and 1870s.
DMITRY FILOSOFOV (1872–1940): a literary critic, religious thinker and political activist, co-founder and first literary editor of the illustrated journal Mir iskusstva (World of Art). Close to both Merezhkovsky and Gippius.
ALEXANDER FINN-YENOTAEVSKY (1872–1943): a revolutionary who assumed the pseudonym Yenotaevsky after being exiled for two years to Yenotaevsk in the Arkhangelsk district.
ZINAIDA NIKOLAEVNA GIPPIUS (1869–1945): a Symbolist poet. Along with her husband Dmitry Merezhkovsky, she hosted an important salon. Always flamboyant, she liked to shock both through her behaviour—insulting her guests and wearing male clothes—and through poems that she herself called “personal prayers” but which others saw as blasphemous. She wrote both under her own name and under several male pseudonyms; the best known was “Anton the Extreme”. After the Revolution, she and Merezhkovsky settled in Paris. “The Green Lamp”, a literary and philosophical society they founded, was attended by many of the most important émigré writers. Teffi ends a separate memoir of Gippius by telling how, after her death, she whispered over her coffin the words, “Friend whom I did not know for long, you did not want to be kind and warm. You wanted to be vicious. Because that is more vivid, isn’t it? As for the sweet tenderness that your soul loved in secret, you hid it in embarrassment from the eyes of others.”
4
Teffi seems unaware of any distinction between vegetarianism and veganism—a distinction perhaps seldom made at this time.
6
Then one of the north-western provinces of the Russian empire, now a part of Lithuania—Kovno in Russian, Kaunas in Lithuanian.
7
In 1951 Teffi sent the manuscript of