Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints

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—collected in Other Worlds and Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me—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; Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; Vasily Grossman’s An Armenian Sketchbook, Everything Flows, Stalingrad, 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 in an annual literary translation summer school, he works as a mentor for the British Centre for Literary Translation.

ELIZABETH CHANDLER is a co-translator, with her husband, of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter; of Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, Everything Flows, An Armenian Sketchbook, and The Road; and of several works by Andrey Platonov.

OTHER WORLDS

PILGRIMS, PEASANTS, SPIRITS, SAINTS

TEFFI

Translated from the Russian by

ROBERT CHANDLER, ELIZABETH CHANDLER, and others

Edited by

ROBERT CHANDLER

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

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 © 2021 Agnès Szydlowski

Translation copyright © 2021 Maria Bloshteyn for The Heart; Anne Marie Jackson for A Quiet Backwater, The Kind That Walk, and Wonder Worker; Sabrina Jaszi for Leshachikha; Sara Jolly for Confession and The House Spirit; Nicolas Pasternak Slater for Bathhouse Devil, Vurdalak, and Witch.

Translation copyright © 2021 Robert Chandler for all other stories, notes, and introductory material

Illustration following introduction: Nicholas Millioti, portrait of Teffi, c. early 1930s; courtesy private collection, Moscow.

Cover image: Natalia Goncharova, Rusalka (Water Nymph), 1908; © 2021 by N. Goncharova, UPRAVIS; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; photograph © by Rheinisches Bildarchiv

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tėffi, N.A. (Nadezhda Aleksandrovna), 1872–1952, author. | Chandler, Robert, 1953– translator.

Title: Other worlds: peasants, pilgrims, spirits, saints / Teffi; translated by [Robert Chandler and 9 others].

Description: New York: New York Review Books, [2020] | Series: New York Review Books classics | Translated into English from Russian.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020015022 (print) | LCCN 2020015023 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681375397 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681375403 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Tėffi, N.A. (Nadezhda Aleksandrovna), 1872–1952 —Translations into English.

Classification: LCC PG3453.B8 A2 2020 (print) | LCC PG3453.B8 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015022

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015023

ISBN 978-1-68137-540-3

v1.0

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

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

CONTENTS

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Copyright and More Information

Foreword

PART ONE

from Earthly Rainbow (1952)

Kishmish

PART TWO

from The Lifeless Beast (1916)

Soul in Bond

Confession

Yavdokha

A Quiet Backwater

The Heart

PART THREE

from Evening Day (1924)

and The Book of June (1931)

Solovki

The Book of June

Wild Evening

Shapeshifter

PART FOUR

from Witch (1936)

Witch

Vurdalak

The House Spirit

Leshachikha

About the House

Bathhouse Devil

Rusalka

Shapeshifters

The Dog

The Kind That Walk

Wonder Worker

Water Spirit

Wolf Night

PART FIVE

from Earthly Rainbow (1952)

Baba Yaga

Volya

Afterword: Spirits of Home, Forest, Field, and Water

A Note on Russian Names

This Translation

Acknowledgments

Recommended Reading

Notes

FOREWORD

There are writers who muddy their own water, to make it seem deeper. Teffi could not be more different: the water is entirely transparent, yet the bottom is barely visible.

—Georgy Adamovich¹

It is not unusual for a writer to be pigeonholed, but few great writers have suffered from this more than Teffi. Several of her finest works are extremely bleak, but many Russians still know only the comic and satirical sketches she wrote during her first years as a professional writer, from 1901 until 1918. Few critics have recognized the full breadth of her human sympathy, her Chekhovian ability to write convincingly about people from every level of society: illiterate peasants, respectable bourgeois, monks and priests, eccentric poets, bewildered émigrés, and public figures ranging from Lev Tolstoy to Rasputin and Lenin. Teffi also has a remarkable gift for writing about children, for showing us the world from the perspective of a small child.

Throughout her life, Teffi was a practicing member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Both Orthodox Christianity and Russian folk religion, with its often poetic understanding of spiritual matters, were important to her. And she recognized that many of her finest stories were those inspired by these themes. In December 1943, she wrote to the historian Piotr Kovalevsky: "Which of my things do I most value? I think that the stories ‘Solovki’ and ‘A Quiet Backwater’ and the collection Witch are well written. In Witch you find our ancient Slav gods, how they still live on in the soul of the people, in legends, superstitions, and customs. Everything as I encountered it in the Russian provinces, as a child."²

Teffi made few such direct statements about her work. I know just one other passage in a similar vein:

During those years of my distant childhood, we used to spend the summer in a wonderful, blessed country—at my mother’s estate in Volhynia Province. I was very little. I had only just begun to learn to read and write—so I must have been about five. [. . .] What slipped quickly through the lives of adults was for us a matter of complex and turbulent experience, entering our games and our dreams, inserting itself like a brightly colored thread into the pattern of our life, into that first firm foundation that psychoanalysts now investigate with such art and diligence, seeing it as the prime cause of many of the madnesses of the human soul.³

These two statements have guided our choice of stories. We have translated all but one of the stories from Witch.⁴ We have included the two other stories Teffi mentions: Solovki, an account of a pilgrimage to the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, and A Quiet Backwater, which incorporates a memorable monologue about the patron saints of various birds, insects, and animals. And we have chosen ten other stories on similar themes, many of them from the first of Teffi’s more serious collections, The Lifeless Beast. For the main part, we present the stories according to their order of publication. The one exception is that we begin with Kishmish, which was written much later. This short, semiautobiographical story serves as a perfect introduction to many of the main themes of Other Worlds.

This is the first time that Teffi’s more otherworldly stories have been brought together in this manner. Our hope is that this will allow readers a clearer sense of the depth of understanding beneath her often dazzling wit and brilliance.

•

Teffi was well aware of how often her work was misunderstood. Her preface to The Lifeless Beast begins:

I do not like prefaces. [. . .]

I would not be writing a preface now were it not for a sad incident.

In October 1914 I published the story Yavdokha. This melancholy and painful story is about a lonely old peasant woman. She is illiterate and muddle-headed and so hopelessly benighted that, when she receives news of the death of her son, she is unable to grasp what has happened. Instead, she wonders whether or not he will be sending her money.

One angry newspaper then [. . .] indignantly scolded me for laughing at human grief.

What does Madame Teffi find funny about this? the newspaper asked indignantly. After quoting the very saddest passages of all, it repeated, And does she consider this funny? And is this funny, too?

The newspaper would probably be most surprised if I were to tell it that I did not laugh for a single minute. [. . .]

And so the aim of this preface is to warn the reader that there is a great deal in this book that is not funny.⁵

•

Several of the stories in The Lifeless Beast seem startlingly modern. The journalist’s misunderstanding shows us how far beyond the conventions of her time Teffi had moved. Yavdokha has no companion but a hog and is hunchbacked from living in a hut that has sunk deep into the ground. She lives five miles from the nearest village and is alienated both from the other peasants and from everything to do with the Russian state. After someone has read out a letter informing her of her son’s death she repeats the word war—but it is unclear if she even grasps what the word means and she certainly does not take in that her son has died. Yavdokha could have stepped out of one of Samuel Beckett’s last plays.

Curiously, misunderstandings not unlike the journalist’s are a central theme of The Lifeless Beast. In some stories, the misunderstandings arise from differences of social class; in others, it is the young and healthy who fail to understand the old and needy; in still others it is adults who fail—or do not even try—to understand children. Teffi’s portrayal of human failings is unflinching; in Happiness, she describes happiness as an empty and hungry creature that can survive only if fed with the warm, human meat of someone else’s envy. In a smaller number of stories, however, she evokes moments of genuine love and compassion. In Daisy, a seemingly inane aristocratic lady enrolls as a military nurse because that is the fashionable thing to do, quickly becomes involved in her work, and, to her surprise, is deeply moved by the gratitude of an uneducated soldier she helps to treat.⁶ The Heart follows a similar pattern; Rakhatova, a frivolous actress, thinks it would be entertaining to confess to a simple, poorly educated monk before receiving Communion in a remote monastery. She is taken aback by the monk’s spontaneous joy when she says she has not committed any grave sins.

The eyes now looking at her were so clear and joyful that they seemed to be flickering, just as stars flicker when their clear light overflows. [. . .]

Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!

He was trembling all over. It was as if he were a large severed heart and a drop of living water had fallen onto it. The heart quivers—and then all the other dead, severed pieces quiver too.

As always, Teffi’s imagery is carefully developed. The last sentence refers back to the scene that greeted Rakhatova and her friends when they arrived at the monastery the previous day:

The peasant was hacking at the fish with a broad knife. [. . .]

Then the peasant took a bucket and poured water over the pieces of fish and the severed head. There was a sudden movement in one of the middle pieces. A twitch, a quiver—and the whole fish responded. Even the chopped-off tail jerked.

That’s its heart contracting, said the Medico.

Born in 1872, Teffi was a contemporary of Alexander Blok and other leading Russian Symbolists. Her own poetry is derivative, but in her prose she shows a remarkable gift for grounding Symbolist themes and imagery in the everyday world. The Heart is entirely realistic and at times even gossipy—yet the story is permeated throughout with Christian symbolism relating to fish. In A Quiet Back-water, she achieves a still more successful synthesis of the heavenly and the earthly. Toward the end of this seven-page story a laundress gives a long disquisition on the name days of various birds, insects, and animals. The mare, the bee, the glowworm—she tells a young visitor—all have their name days. And so does the earth herself: And the Feast of the Holy Ghost is the name day of the earth herself. On this day, no one dairnst disturb the earth. No diggin, or sowin—not even flower pickin, or owt. No buryin t’ dead. Great sin it is, to upset the earth on ’er name day. Aye, even beasts understand. On that day, they dairnst lay a claw, nor a hoof, nor a paw on the earth. Great sin, yer see. In a key poem—almost a manifesto—of French Symbolism, Charles Baudelaire interprets the whole world as a web of mystical correspondences. In a less grandiose way, Teffi conveys a similar vision. She was, I imagine, delighted by the paradox of the earth’s name day being the Feast of the Holy Spirit—not, as one might expect, the feast of a saint associated with some activity like plowing.

The Lifeless Beast is notable for its striking imagery and bold rendition of peasant speech, and for being one of a very few treatments in Russian literature of the First World War as experienced by civilians. Teffi’s insight into human selfishness and viciousness never wavers. Nevertheless, she remains true to her faith in Christian love—as practiced by Daisy in a field hospital, as experienced by Rakhatova through Orthodox ritual, and as embodied in the generous, restorative understandings of folk religion.

•

In early 1920 Teffi settled in Paris. Russian émigrés throughout the world were quick to set up publishing houses and Teffi was one of their most valued authors. In 1921 alone she published five books: two miniature selections of articles and stories, in Berlin; a collection of comic sketches, in Shanghai; the short-story collection Black Iris, in Stockholm; and A Quiet Backwater—which includes most of the stories from The Lifeless Beast—in Paris.

Teffi’s high standing is still more clearly shown by her publications in periodicals. Ke fer? (Que Faire?)—a brilliant evocation of the Russians’ sense of alienation in Paris—was published in April 1920, in the first issue of the important The Latest News. And Solovki—an almost Bruegelesque account of the widespread practice of mass pilgrimage to holy sites—was the first item in the first issue (August 1921) of the glamorous, lavishly illustrated journal The Firebird, which featured work by almost all the best-known émigré writers and artists. These two publications serve as markers to the twin paths Teffi would follow for the next fifty years. Many of her stories are about the mishaps and absurdities of émigré life; others are about a long-lost past.

Solovki was republished in Evening Day. Teffi’s following collection, A Small Town (Paris, 1927), is not represented in Other Worlds, since most of the stories deal with her émigré present—the small town of Russian Paris—rather than her Russian past. We have, however, included three stories from The Book of June. Like Solovki, the title story is a sympathetic account of overwhelming religious experience. Here, however, Teffi enters more deeply into the heroine’s inner world, into her most inarticulate thoughts and feelings; it is one of Teffi’s most sensitive treatments of adolescence.

•

Most of the stories in Witch bear the titles of folkloric beings—for example, Wonder Worker, The House Spirit, or Rusalka (a female water spirit resembling the Lorelei). Some of the stories are grim, some fanciful, some sober and philosophical. Some are realistic, with only the merest hint at the supernatural; in others, the supernatural motifs are more pronounced. Sometimes a character tries all too transparently to cover up his or her misconduct through some implausible supernatural explanation; sometimes it is the rationalist skeptics who appear foolish and blinkered. One piece, About the House, is hardly a story at all—more like a chatty retelling of a scholarly article, with a brief anecdote tacked on at the end.

All the stories are presented from the perspective of a Russian exile. Often the tone is nostalgic. Sometimes there is a note of bewilderment: Could such things truly have happened? Could such a world as old Russia really have existed?

Witch is a coherent and self-contained collection. Its main themes, however, are anticipated in Wild Evening and Shapeshifter, the last two stories in The Book of June. The central character of these two stories—and also of the first and last stories of Witch—is clearly modeled on Teffi herself. In 1892, aged twenty, Teffi married a lawyer by the name of Vladislav Buchinsky. We know little about her years as a young wife and mother, living in small provincial towns, but we know from statements Teffi made later that she was deeply unhappy.

Wild Evening is about fear of the unknown; except for an opportunistic peddler, everyone in the story—the young Teffi, the monks, even the horse—is in a state of terror. All around lurk threatening forces—darkness, cattle plague, the unclean dead. Shapeshifter may represent Teffi’s fantasy of a different course her life might have followed; a stranger’s chance intervention prompts the Teffi figure to decide against marriage to a lawyer who has much in common with the real-life Buchinsky. The opening, title story of Witch shows us a young husband and wife feeling more and more exasperated with each other as they grow ever more afraid—though neither will admit it—of a maid suspected of witchcraft. And in Wolf Night, the concluding story of Witch, we glimpse this same husband and wife perhaps a year or two later. The husband has grown even more resentful and evil-tempered, and the wife—now pregnant—is overwhelmed by nightmares of the house being surrounded by wolves. Ten lines before the end of the story, the husband says to the wife, Please! Do me a favor! Go and stay with your oh so clever mother. A fine way she must have brought you up, to make you into such a hysteric.

Teffi did not ever go back to her oh so clever mother, though it is possible that her husband may have uttered some sarcasm similar to the above. All we know for sure is that in 1898, probably on the edge of a breakdown, Teffi abandoned her husband and three children and moved back to Petersburg to begin her career as a professional writer. There is little doubt that this rupture—which she very seldom spoke about—was a source of almost unbearable guilt and pain. Nevertheless, the words she wrote nearly fifty years later to her eldest daughter have the ring of truth. After saying she had been a bad mother, Teffi backtracks: In essence I was good, but circumstances drove me from home, where, had I remained, I would have perished.⁷

At the heart of Witch, framed by these stories drawing on her unhappy life as a young woman, stands a group of six stories in which Teffi moves further back in time, to her own childhood. At one level, these can be read as a fictional treatment of folk beliefs in Volhynia (now part of western Ukraine). At the same time, they constitute a memorial to Teffi’s younger sister Lena, the closest to her of her six siblings. Lena had died in 1919, and Teffi writes movingly about her death in Memories, which she completed only shortly before the stories in Witch. In both books, Teffi portrays herself and Lena as inseparable.

One of these stories, The Kind That Walk, is a study of antisemitism—and of xenophobia more generally. Teffi deftly shows us people’s blind fear of Moshka, an honest and competent Jewish carpenter; she is equally deft in evoking the fascination with which she and Lena listen to the adults’ wild talk about how Moshka, many years earlier, had been dragged off by the devil. Many of the other main characters in these six stories are domestic servants. Teffi’s mother and some of her elder siblings appear now and then, but it is the children’s Nyanya, or nanny, who is the most important authority figure.

There are also two stories set mainly in Moscow and Petersburg. The longer of these, The Dog, begins with the narrator, Lyalya, recalling idyllically happy summers as a teenager on a country estate in the company of friends and admirers. In those days, she says with pained emphasis, she was carefree and high-spirited. She had felt briefly troubled, however, by the intense feeling with which a shy young boy called Tolya once swore eternal devotion to her, promising always to remain her faithful dog. A few years later, Lyalya falls in with the bohemian crowd who frequent the Stray Dog, the famous Petersburg cabaret where all the major poets of the time used to give readings. Somehow, almost inadvertently, Lyalya takes up with Harry Edvers, a particularly odious pseudo-poet who later ends up working for the Cheka, the Bolshevik security police. In the story’s final scene she calls on her faithful dog for help—with dramatic results. Lyalya concludes,

That’s the whole story; that’s what I wanted to tell you. I’ve made nothing up; I’ve added nothing; and there’s nothing I can explain—or even want to explain. But when I turn back and consider the past, I can see everything clearly. I can see each separate event and the axis or thread upon which a certain force had strung them.

It had strung the events on the thread like beads and tied up the loose ends.

The Dog is convincing on every level. As an evocation of a lost childhood paradise, the first pages bear comparison with the work of Teffi’s friend and colleague Ivan Bunin. As a reckoning with the febrile cultural world of prerevolutionary Petersburg, it anticipates Anna Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero (written 1940–1965). Like Akhmatova, Teffi sees the bohemian abandonment of traditional moral values as having paved the way for the brutalities and duplicities of Communism. And the denouement provides a fine example of a writer drawing on the occult not for exotic ornament but as a source of psychological truth. The huge dog’s sudden appearance may be mere chance; it may be a real embodiment of Tolya’s loyal and resolute spirit; or it may be Tolya’s spirit prompting Lyalya toward an act that requires superhuman powers. Teffi has taken care not to exclude any of these possibilities. Unlike the certain force spoken of by her narrator, she does not tie up the story’s loose ends.

•

In the letter quoted earlier, Teffi says of Witch, This book has been highly praised by Bunin, Kuprin, and Merezhkovsky. They praised it for its artistry and the excellence of its language. I am, by the way, proud of my language, which critics have seldom commented on.⁸

Teffi’s pride is justified. Along with Andrey Bely, Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Andrey Platonov, she is one of a number of great twentieth-century Russian prose writers who were also poets but whose poetic gifts found their truest expression in prose. It is difficult, though, to define what makes Teffi’s language so remarkable. She makes skillful use of repetition, often using a single word as a leitmotif for an entire story. In Wild Evening, for example, she uses the adjective "dikii (wild) of a horse’s eye, of the night, of a person, and of the dangerously high seat of a two-wheel carriage. In Rusalka she repeats mutnyi" (murky, cloudy, troubled) more and more often in the course of the story; she uses the word especially often in relation to the two sisters’ troubled visions in the last pages, when one of the housemaids either drowns or turns into a rusalka and the girls fall ill with scarlet fever. It is also true that Teffi has a fine ear for the linguistic peculiarities of people from different social groups—ranging from Volhynia peasants to Russian émigrés in Paris; it is not for nothing that the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, as a novice writer, noted down some of Teffi’s most striking coinages and malapropisms.⁹ Nevertheless, the 1920s was a rich period for Russian prose and none of the above is enough to make Teffi unique.

What truly sets her apart is her lightness of touch. More than Vladislav Khodasevich, more than Akhmatova or any of the Acmeist poets, it is Teffi who has inherited the grace and fluency of Pushkin. She can write as simply and tautly as Hemingway—but without the least sense of willed tightness. She can write long, complex sentences dense with embedded participial clauses, yet these sentences, unlike apparently similar sentences in the work of Bunin, retain a conversational quality. Some of her more unreliable narrators come out with phrases as memorably absurd as characters out of Zoshchenko—yet even here there is a difference. Zoshchenko’s sentences seem brilliantly constructed; Teffi’s appear simply to have happened. It may be for this very reason—her success in creating an illusion of naturalness—that Teffi’s language has received so little scholarly attention.

Many of her greatest contemporaries, however, were well aware of her gifts. Zoshchenko studied her intently; Bunin admired her; Mikhail Bulgakov borrowed from her Civil War articles for his The White Guard. And Georgy Ivanov referred to Teffi as a unique phenomenon in Russian literature, a true miracle that people will still be wondering at in a hundred years’ time, crying and laughing at once.¹⁰

•

The last two pieces in this collection are Baba Yaga and Volya, two essays from Earthly Rainbow (published six months before Teffi’s death), in which Teffi asserts her profound Russianness. Baba Yaga is the name of the archetypal Russian folktale witch and the word "volya is used for what Teffi understands as a peculiarly Russian kind of unbounded emotional freedom. Both essays end with a heartfelt cry. Baba Yaga, confined in her wintry hut, longing for wildness, freedom, and open spaces, cries, B—o—r—i—n—g. And in the last lines of Volya the aging Teffi remembers herself as a young woman, waving at the spring dawn and crying out, Vo-o-o-ly-a-a-a! Shortly before this, she has heard a boy on the other side of the river singing his heart out. The last line of his song—Sing Volya, Volya, Volya!—is described as heartrending, piercingly joyful, like a sudden yelp, coming from somewhere too deep in the soul."

Teffi is indeed one of the most graceful of Russian writers. It seems likely, however, that this grace is a way of managing an almost unbearable burden of pain. There are a great many heartfelt cries in these stories. Some of these cries and desperate screams seem almost infectious, so agonizing that those who hear them can’t help but let out similar screams. The epileptic sleigh driver in Shapeshifter, for example, lets out a cry with something so terrible about it that the narrator screams too, jumping up from her seat and almost tumbling out of the sleigh. And the narrator of Witch describes, at some length, the scream of