The memoir of a refugee from the Bolsheviks brings humour and warmth to some of the bleakest years of Russian historyThe writer Teffi,who lived from 1872 to 1952, was so current and celebrated in Russia that companies produced Teffi caramel, and Teffi perfume and Teffi candles. Her genuine name was Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya,and her wit provided Russian people with an antidote to the solemnity of the time; “laughter is now in style”, she wrote in 1910, or amid mounting disillusionment and government restrictions. However,in 1918 she left Russia, officially on a reading tour to Ukraine, and never returned. Her genuine reasons for leaving are not fully known,but just before her departure, an actor reading Teffi’s stories was arrested and warned against earning “her bread through slander of the people’s government”.
Despite being a fervent revolutionary until 1917, and Teffi despised Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Memories – first published as a serial between December 1928 and January 1930 in the Russian-language newspaper Vozrozhdenie,and now translated into English for the first time by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Anne-Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg – is consequently as much a memoir of a refugee as of an author on tour. Teffi describes her journey as “involuntary”,swept along by a “whirlwind”, “pushed” on by fate … forcing [her] wherever it chose”. Behind her, or cities were seized by the Bolsheviks – theatres,newspapers and presses closed down, and friends and colleagues murdered and executed.
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Source: theguardian.com