Надежда Лохвицкая - Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me - The Best of Teffi

I conferred with my sister. She said that when you called on a writer you had to bring a small photograph of him and ask him to autograph it, or else he wouldn’t even talk to you. Then she said that writers didn’t talk to juveniles anyway.

It was very intimidating.

Gradually I worked out where Tolstoy lived. People were telling me different things—one person said he lived in Khamovniki, another said he’d left Moscow, and someone else said he would be leaving any day now.

I bought the photograph and started to think about what to say. I was afraid I might just start crying. I didn’t let anyone in the house know about my plans—they would have laughed at me.

Finally, I took the plunge. Some relatives had come for a visit and the household was a flurry of activity—it seemed a good moment. I asked my elderly nanny to walk me “to a friend’s house to do some homework” and we set off.

Tolstoy was at home. The few minutes I spent waiting in his foyer were too short to orchestrate a getaway. And with my nanny there it would have been awkward.

I remember a stout lady humming as she walked by. I certainly wasn’t expecting that. She walked by entirely naturally. She wasn’t afraid, and she was even humming. I had thought everyone in Tolstoy’s house would walk on tiptoe and speak in whispers.

Finally he appeared. He was shorter than I’d expected. He looked at Nanny, then at me. I held out the photograph and, too scared to be able to pronounce my “R”s, I mumbled, “Would you pwease sign your photogwaph?”

He took it out of my hand and went into the next room.

At this point I understood that I couldn’t possibly ask him for anything and that I’d never dare say why I’d come. With my “pwease” and “photogwaph” I had brought shame on myself. Never, in his eyes, would I be able to redeem myself. Only by the grace of God would I get out of here in one piece.

He came back and gave me the photograph. I curtsied.

“What can I do for you, madam?” he asked Nanny.

“Nothing, sir, I’m here with the young lady, that’s all.”

Later on, lying in bed, I remembered my “pwease” and “photogwaph” and cried into my pillow.

At school I had a rival named Yulenka Arsheva. She, too, was in love with Prince Andrei, but so passionately that the whole class knew about it. She, too, was angry with Natasha Rostova and she, too, could not believe that the Prince shrieked.

I was taking great care to hide my own feelings. Whenever Yulenka grew agitated, I tried to keep my distance and not listen to her so that I wouldn’t betray myself.

And then, one day, during literature class, our teacher was analysing various literary characters. When he came to Prince Bolkonsky, the class turned as one to Yulenka. There she sat, red-faced, a strained smile on her lips and her ears so suffused with blood that they even looked swollen.

Their names were now linked. Their romance evoked mockery, curiosity, censure, intense personal involvement—the whole gamut of attitudes with which society always responds to any romance.

I alone did not smile—I alone, with my secret, “illicit” feeling, did not acknowledge Yulenka or even dare look at her.

In the evening I sat down to read about his death. But now I read without hope. I was no longer praying for a miracle.

I read with feelings of grief and suffering, but without protest. I lowered my head in submission, kissed the book and closed it.

There once was a life. It was lived out, and it ended.

People who knew Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius well do not write very warmly of them in their memoirs.

Andrei Bely writes that Merezhkovsky wore shoes with pompoms, and that these pompoms epitomized the whole of Merezhkovsky’s life. Both his speech and his thought had “pompoms”. [1] A reference to Bely’s “Memories of Blok”, published in Berlin in 1922–23. Merezhkovsky’s habit of wearing carpet slippers with pompoms is mentioned by several other memoirists.

Not the most precise of descriptions, but certainly not a very kind one. Though Andrei Bely was not without “pompoms” of his own.

Alexei Remizov calls Merezhkovsky a walking coffin, and says that “Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius was all bones and springs—a complex mechanical apparatus—but it was impossible to think of her as a living human being. With stinging malice they rejected every manifestation of life.”

The complex mechanical apparatus called Zinaida Gippius was in fact a great deal more complex than “bones and springs”.

I’ve more than once had occasion to read extremely spiteful literary reminiscences about “friends”. Something along the lines of an earthly Last Judgment. A man is stripped of all his coverings and ornaments and his naked corpse is dragged out into the open to be ridiculed.

This is cruel and wrong. We must not forget how difficult it is to be a human being.

After reading memoirs like this, one writer recently said, “You know, for the first time in my life, I’ve felt terrified by the thought of dying.”

And I was reminded of a sweet lady from Petersburg who said of a friend, “There’s nothing this woman won’t stoop to if she thinks she’ll gain by it. You can take my word for it—I’m her best friend.”

Trying to describe Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius really is very difficult.

Each was one of a kind, completely out of the ordinary—the usual yardsticks did not apply to them. Their literary gifts aside—considered simply as people—each could have been the central character in a long psychological novel.

Their extraordinary, almost tragic egocentricity was understandable once one had found the key to it. This key was their utter detachment from everyone else, a detachment that seemed innate and which they had no compunctions about. Like Gogol’s Khoma Brut, who had drawn a circle around himself. [2] From Nikolai Gogol’s story “Viy”. Neither howling demons nor the flying coffin of a dead sorceress could touch him. He felt cold and he was alone, although there was nothing but a circle separating him—and separating the Merezhkovskys—from people and life. When the Merezhkovskys felt frightened, they briskly sought the help of holy intercessors. They decorated their statuette of Saint Theresa with flowers and, with neither faith nor divine inspiration, mumbled their way through their invocations. On Dmitry Sergeyevich’s death, Zinaida Nikolaevna felt so upset with Saint Theresa for allowing this bad thing to happen that she threw a shawl over the statuette and stood it in the corner. Just like a savage who smears his deity with fat when things go well, and flogs it in the event of misfortune. That is just the way she was. And—at the same time—Zinaida Gippius was an intelligent, subtle and talented poet. An extraordinary combination. She was indeed one of a kind.

When he was told that war had been declared, Dmitry Sergeyevich observed perfectly coolly, “Ah well—but I think the trains will keep running.”

The trains would keep running—and he would be able to take himself off somewhere far, far away, so that the circle he had drawn would not be broken, so that he, Merezhkovsky, would not feel the touch of hard, wicked life; and as for what lay out there, beyond the magic circle—cold, hunger, violence and death—that would be other people’s concern, it wouldn’t touch him.

The Merezhkovskys led strange lives and were so out of touch with reality that it was positively startling to hear them come out with ordinary words like “coal”, “boiled water” and “macaroni”. The word “ink” was less startling—at least it had to do with writing and ideas… They both lived in the world of ideas, and they were unable to see or in any way understand either people or life itself. You won’t find a single real person in any of their writings. Zinaida Gippius freely acknowledged this, saying that the actors in her stories were not people but ideas.