Teffi (1872–1952) was the pen name of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya,
born in St. Petersburg into a distinguished family that treasured
literature. She and her three sisters all became writers. Teffi
wrote in a variety of styles and genres: political feuilletons
published in a Bolshevik newspaper during her brief period of
radical fervor after the 1905 Revolution; Symbolist poems that she
declaimed or sang in Petersburg literary salons; popular one-act
plays, mostly humorous or satirical—one was entitled The Woman
Question; and a novel titled simply Adventure Novel. Her finest
works are her short stories and Memories, a witty, tragic, and
deeply perceptive account of her last journey across Russia and
what is now Ukraine, before going by boat to Istanbul in the summer
of 1919. Teffi was widely read; her admirers included not only such
writers as Bunin, Bulgakov, and Zoshchenko, but also both Lenin and
the last tsar. In pre-Revolutionary Russia, candies and perfumes
were named after her; after the Revolution, her stories were
published and her plays performed throughout the Russian diaspora.
She died in Paris.
Robert Chandler’s translations from Russian include
Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (an NYRB classic);
Nikolay Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; Vasily Grossman’s An
Armenian Sketchbook, Everything Flows, Life and Fate, and The Road
(all NYRB classics); and Hamid Ismailov’s Central Asian novel, The
Railway. His co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won prizes
both in the UK and in the US. 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. As well as running regular translation workshops in
London and teaching the annual Translate in the City literary
translation course, he works as a mentor for the British Centre for
Literary Translation.
Elizabeth Chandler is a co-translator, with Robert Chandler,
of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and of several titles by Andrey
Platonov and Vasily Grossman.
Anne Marie Jackson has lived for extended periods in Russia
and Moldova. She is a co-translator, with Robert Chandler and Rose
France, of Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi
(available as an NYRB classic). Her previous translations include
works by Alexei Nikitin, Maxim Osipov, and Olga Slavnikova.
Irina Steinberg was born in Moscow in 1983. She emigrated to
England with her family at the age of eight and now lives primarily
in London. She has a BA in English language and literature from
University College London, as well as postgraduate qualifications
in law. She started pursuing her interest in translation
professionally in her late twenties and was a co-translator of
Teffi’s Subtly Worded and Other Stories (2014).
Edythe Haber is Professor Emerita of Russian at the
University of Massachusetts Boston and a Center Associate at the
Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard
University. She is the author of Mikhail Bulgakov: The Early Years
(1998) and of many articles on Russian literature, particularly on
Bulgakov, Teffi, and Vladimir Nabokov. She is presently completing
a critical biography of Teffi.
“Despite the backdrop of terror, war, death and loss, Teffi’s world
becomes somewhere we do not want to leave…Teffi, somehow, makes
some of the bleakest years of Russian history brighter; the country
shrinks to the size of a village in which its occupants are a
community, living, working together and helping each other."
—Claire Kohda Hazelton, The Guardian
"Poignant reflections of a beloved Russian humorist as she fled her
homeland on the eve of Bolshevik victory....Throughout, the
author's characterizations are precise and even ruthless, and she
captures the tense mood of paranoia and sorrow of the refugee.
Fluently translated by several hands and introduced by Teffi's
biographer, Edythe Haber, these are priceless anecdotes and
beautiful portraits of friends and acquaintances lost forever."
—Kirkus (starred review)
"This new translation…. of [Teffi’s] autobiographical work is a
solid reintroduction to her charmingly Chekhovian voice… it is that
juxtaposition of the frightful and the comical that brings Teffi’s
work to its perfection….Readers who enjoy the acerbic and ironic
tone of David Sedaris and the humane observations of Anton Chekhov
should find themselves in familiar company with this work.”
—Library Journal
“A carefully constructed, imaginative, and richly poetic
narrative.” —Maria Bloshteyn, Los Angeles Review of Books
“The memoir [Memories] would be fascinating under any
circumstances, but it has special poignancy now, when millions of
Ukrainians have been displaced by a conflict that is half tragedy
and half farce.”—Sophie Pinkham, The New Yorker
“With an unflinching eye for detail, whether noting the comedy of a
fellow refugee’s turn of phrase or the torture enacted on his
prisoners by a sadistic colonel, Teffi paints a portrait of a
unique historical moment that also resonates with contemporary
horrors.” —Lucy Scholes, BBC
"I never imagined such a memoir could be possible, especially about
the Russian Civil War. Teffi wears her wisdom lightly, observing
farce and foible amid the looming tragedy, in this enthralling
book" —Antony Beevor
"Teffi demonstrates a profound sympathy for the ordinary people
among whom she counts herself, swept along by cataclysmic events.
While she sympathises with those who cannot help themselves, she is
not afraid to look into the depths of what human beings can do to
one another and what happens when civilisation breaks down."
—Virginia Rounding, Financial Times
"The book is expertly and collectively translated by Robert
Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson and Irina
Steinberg. It reads extremely easily and well in English and is
furnished with an introduction, translators' afterword and copious
notes to explain references and allusions now lost to time."
—William Boyd, Sunday Times
"Memories is an astonishing work that, like Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows
the Don, and for many of the same reasons, deserves to be turned
into a film. It is both a thriller and an unforgettably personal
account of one of the worst periods in Russian history." —Catherine
Brown, Literary Review
"[An] astonishingly vivid memoir...Wittily, wryly, wistfully, but
never self-indulgently, Teffi tells the story of her escape from
Moscow to Kiev to Odessa and onto a dodgy boat to cross the Black
Sea as the country she loves is turned upside down in the aftermath
of the Bolshevik revolution." —Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Country
Life
"A vividly idiosyncratic personal account of the disintegration -
moral, political, strategic - of Tsarist Russia after the
Revolution, as alive to the farcical and the ridiculous as it is to
the tragic; a bit like what Chekhov might have written if he had
lived to experience it." —Michael Frayn
"Teffi is a courageous companion for anyone’s life.” —Erica Wagner,
The New Statesman
“Speaking of brilliant writers, here’s something from one of the
20th century’s best....In this, remarkably the first English
translation of her trek across a chaotic post-revolution Russia,
[Teffi] sparkles with her usual wit and humanity, her Gogol-like
love of the absurd matching her Chekhovian ear for dialogue…she
always finds the funny but never loses sight of the sadness.
Awesome." —Jane Graham, The Big Issue
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