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

“We Are Still Living” may not have been published in Teffi’s lifetime. Included in Kontrrevolyutsionnaya bukva (St Petersburg: Azbuka, 2006) and Teffi v strane vospominanii (Kiev: LP Media, 2011).

“The Gadarene Swine” was first published in Gryadushchy Den’ (Odessa), March 1919; reprinted in Kontrrevolyutsionnaya bukva and Teffi v strane vospominanii .

“My First Tolstoy” was first published in Poslednie novosti (Paris), 21st November 1920.

“The Merezhkovskys” was first published in Novoe russkoe slovo (New York), 29 January 1950; reprinted in Moya Letopis’ .

“Ilya Repin” was first published in Moya Letopis’ from a manuscript in RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art).

Earlier versions of these translations have been published as follows: “Rasputin” and “My First Tolstoy” in Subtly Worded (London: Pushkin Press, 2014); “Love” in Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (London: Penguin Classics, 2005).

Thank you to the following, who have all either helped check the English texts or answer questions about the original:

Tamara Alexandrova, Maria Bloshteyn, Ilona Chavasse, Olive Classe, Jane Costlow, Kathryn Davies, Boris Dralyuk, Alexandra Fleming, Paul Gallagher, Anna Gunin, Anne Gutt, Edythe Haber, Nicky Harman, Rosalind Harvey, Sara Jolly, Elena Malysheva, Steve Marder, Melanie Mauthner, Olga Meerson, Melanie Moore, Alexander Nakhimovsky, Natasha Perova, Anna Pilkington, Joseph Prestwich, Donald Rayfield, Richard Shaw, Yevgeny Slivkin, Irina Steinberg, Elena Trubilova, Elena Volkova, Maria Wiltshire, Christine Worobec, and many other members of two invaluable mail groups—the Emerging Translators’ Network and SEELANGS.

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.

ROSE FRANCE has translated poems by Lermontov for the collection After Lermontov: Verses for the Centenary (2014) and a number of stories and sketches by Teffi and Zoshchenko for two forthcoming anthologies. She teaches Russian language, literature, and translation at the University of Edinburgh and translation at the University of Stirling.

ANNE MARIE JACKSON has lived for extended periods in Russia and Moldova. She is a co-translator, with Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, and Irina Steinberg, of Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (available as an NYRB classic). Her previous translations include works by Alexei Nikitin, Maxim Osipov, and Olga Slavnikova.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Original Russian texts © by Agnès Szydlowski

English translations © 2016 by Rose France except: “My Pseudonym,” “The Gadarene Swine,” “The Merezhkovskys” © 2016 by Anne Marie Jackson; “How I Live and Work,” “Love,” “Ilya Repin” © 2016 by Robert Chandler; “Rasputin,” “My First Tolstoy” © 2014 by Anne Marie Jackson, first published in Subtly Worded (Pushkin Press, 2014).

“Teffi the Fool” © 2016 by Robert Chandler

“A Note on the Texts” © 2016 by Anne Marie Jackson

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Natalia Goncharova, Landscape, Spring , 1926–27; © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris; collection State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Cover design: Katy Homans

An earlier version of Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s English translation of “Love” appeared in Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics, 2005).

Published simultaneously in Great Britain under the title Rasputin and Other Ironies by Pushkin Press, 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tėffi, N. A. (Nadezhda Aleksandrovna), 1872–1952, author. | Chandler, Robert, 1953– translator, editor, writer of preface. | Chandler, Elizabeth, 1947– translator. | France, Rose, translator. | Jackson, Anne Marie, translator, editor.

Title: Tolstoy, Rasputin, others, and me : the best of Teffi / by Teffi ; a new translation from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Rose France, and Anne Marie Jackson ; edited by Robert Chandler and Anne Marie Jackson ; introduction by Robert Chandler.

Other titles: New York Review Books classics.

Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2016. | Series: New York Review Books classics | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016004093 (print) | LCCN 2016005272 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590179963 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781590179970 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PG3453.B8 A2 2016 (print) | LCC PG3453.B8 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/42—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016004093

ISBN 978-1-59017-997-0

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.comor write to:

Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

A common French idiom. Here, the sense is “Well, that’s just too bad.”

Taffy is the name of a young British art student in Trilby , a novel by George du Maurier; it is also the name of a young girl in one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. And “Taffy was a Welshman” is the first line of a well-known English nursery rhyme. Teffi gives these two lines in English, misquoting and misspelling as here. She is, presumably, reproducing how she used to say these lines as a child. In this apparently autobiographical article Teffi is, as always, being playful. In reality, she first used the pseudonym “Teffi” as early as 1901, six years before the first performances of The Woman Question (Elena Trubilova, in Na ostrove moikh vospominanii (Tikhvin, 2016), p. 12).