Надежда Лохвицкая - Memories - From Moscow to the Black Sea

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.

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

Copyright © Agnès Szydlowski

Translation copyright © 2016 by Robert Chandler and Irina Steinberg

Introduction copyright © 2016 by Edythe Haber

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Natalia Goncharova, Rayonism, Blue-Green Forest (detail), 1913; © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris; Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Cover design: Katy Homans

Author photo courtesy of Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Bakhmeteff Archive, the Nadezhda Teffi Papers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tėffi, N. A. (Nadezhda Aleksandrovna), 1872–1952, author. | Chandler, Robert, 1953– translator. | Chandler, Elizabeth, 1947– translator. | Jackson, Anne Marie, translator. | Steinberg, Irina, translator. | Haber, Edythe C., writer of introduction.

Title: Memories : from Moscow to the Black Sea / by Teffi ; translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Anne-Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg ; introduction by Edythe Haber.

Other titles: Vospominaniia. English | New York Review Books classics.

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

Identifiers: LCCN 2015043142 | ISBN 9781590179512 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Tėffi, N. A. (Nadezhda Aleksandrovna), 1872–1952. | Women authors, Russian—20th century—Biography. | Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Personal narratives.

Classification: LCC PG3453.B8 Z4613 2016 | DDC 891.73/42—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043142

ISBN 978-1-59017-952-9

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 longer version of “Before a Map of Russia” was published in Vozrozhdenie (Oct. 2, 1925). This shorter version was published in the almanac Na zapade (New York, 1953). The present translation first appeared in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin, 2015), ed. Chandler, Dralyuk, and Mashinski.

“Retrospektivnyi vzgliad i udivlenie,” Novyi Satirikon , no. 6, (Mar), 1918: 13. Rep. in Teffi, V strane vospominanii. Rasskazy i fel’etony 1917–1919 , ed. S. I. Kniazev & M. A. Rybakov (Kiev: LP Media, 2011), 164.

M[ark] A[ldanov], “Teffi. Passiflora ,” Sovremennye zapiski , 1923, no. 17: 485.

“Nadezhda Teffi,” in F. F. Fidler, ed., Pervye literaturnye shagi: Avtobiografii sovremennykh russkikh pisatelei (Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1911), 203.

Teffi, “Chuchelo,” Vozrozhdenie , Jan. 11, 1931 (no. 2049): 2.

“Mne snilsia son…,” Sever , 1901 (no. 35): 1101; Fidler, 204–5.

Teffi, “Pokaiannyi den’,” Teatr i iskusstvo , 1901, no. 51 (Dec. 16): 955; “Novyi god u pisatelei,” Zvezda , 1901, no. 52 (Dec. 29): 14–16, 18.

The play, “Zhenskii vopros,” has been translated by Elizabeth Neatrour as “The Woman Question: A Fantastical Farce in One Act,” in An Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing, 1777–1992 , ed. Catriona Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994): 174–92.

Aldanov.

“Znamia svobody,” Vpered , Mar. 2 (15), 1905. Pub. as “Pchelki” in Novaia zhizn’ , no. 2 (1905) and in Teffi’s collection of poetry, Sem’ ognei (Spb.: Shipovnik, 1910), 57–58.

I. Gukovskii, “Iz vospominanii I. E. Gukovskogo,” Novaia zhizn’: Pervaia legal’naia S.-D. bol’shevistskaia gazeta, 27 oktiabria—3 dekabria 1905 goda , ed. M. Ol’minskii, vyp 1, no. 1–7 (Leningrad: Rabochee izd. “Priboi”, 1925), x.

“18 oktiabria,” Novaia zhizn’ , Oct. 27, 1905 (no. 1): 7.

For Teffi’s retrospective view of Novaia zhizn’ and the Bolsheviks, see “45 let,” Novoe russkoe slovo , June 25, 1950 (no. 13939): 2; “ ’Novaia zhizn’’,” NRS , July 9, 1950 (no. 13953): 2. For an English translation, see Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me (NYRB, 2016).

“Smekh,” Russkoe slovo , Nov. 18 (Dec. 1), 1910: 2.

Iumoristicheskie rasskazy (SPb: Shipovnik, 1910).

M. Kuzmin, “Zametki o russkoi belletristiki, Apollon , no. 9 (Jul.–Aug., 1910): 34.

N. Lerner, “N. Teffi. ‘Dym bez ognia’,” Literat. i popul.-nauchn. prilozhenie ‘Nivy’ , no. 2 (July, 1914): 459.