‘Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea,’ by Teffi

Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, known as Teffi.CreditCreditFine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images

From Moscow to the Black Sea
By Teffi
267 pp. New York Review Books. Paper, $16.95.

There is no word in the English vernacular for the state of being a refugee. “Emigration” conjures an orderly move, with well-packed luggage and well-laid plans. The state of fleeing one’s home is something else entirely, and it stands to reason there is no common word for it. It is the state of knowing nothing — not how long the journey will last, nor what its final destination may be, nor how one will recognize it when it is reached. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, more than a million Russian citizens were plunged into this state for months or years at a time. The refugees included some of the country’s best writers: Marina Tsvetayeva, Ivan Bunin, Viktor Shklovsky, among others. In his autobiography, “Speak, Memory,” Vladimir Nabokov called his journey a “syncopal kick,” as though he had momentarily lost consciousness in Russia and awaked to life in a different rhythm in bourgeois Europe. Nabokov, who wrote that it was an experience he “would not have missed for worlds,” was a teenager at the time of the move. The adult writers among the refugees were left to try to describe the indescribable.

Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, who wrote under the pen name Teffi, was 46 when she became a refugee, and several years passed before she was settled again. The revolution had ended her comfortable St. Petersburg life as one of the country’s most popular writers. Her plays were produced by the big theaters, she regularly contributed humorous columns to major newspapers and magazines, and she had a public presence as an intellectual and a patron of charitable organizations. A year or two later she would remember her life: “Petersburg. Evenings. Languid, high-strung ladies, sophisticated young men. A table adorned with white lilac. A conversation about a yellow sapphire. . . .” At the time of this recollection, she was living in a ship’s bathroom, which she shared with three men.

But how does one describe the state of being a no one nowhere, with no place on the map, or in society, to claim as one’s own? If one is Teffi, one does not pretend to know what she did not know at the time. The brief stories of her journey through Russia, from its western border to the southern one, contain almost no generalizations. On only a couple of occasions does the writer insert a fact that she learned months or years after the events she is describing. She succeeds in conveying the sense of claustrophobia and disorientation that are the refugee condition.

A trademark of Teffi’s writing had always been her ability to describe the absurd as though it were the ordinary. In the second half of this book, following a harrowing train journey through Russia and Ukraine (with stays in German-occupied Kiev and French-occupied Odessa, which she flees as the Reds approach), Teffi ends up aboard a ship commandeered by an ad hoc group of refugees. The passengers and the crew of this tiny vessel are one, and Teffi, despite being a famous writer, is reproached for not pitching in. She ­seizes the opportunity to work because, as a small child, she had once watched sailors washing a deck and thought it looked like great fun:

“There I had stood, a little girl with blue eyes and blond pigtails, watching this sailors’ game with reverence and envy, upset that fate would never allow me this joy.

“But kind fate had taken pity on that poor little girl. . . . It staged a war and a revolution. It turned the whole world upside down, and now, at last, it had found an opportunity to thrust a long-handled brush into the girl’s hands and send her up on deck.

“At last! Thank you, dear fate!”

And so Teffi goes up to hose down and scrub the deck while wearing silver shoes — because, like everyone on board, she is pragmatically wearing the clothes that will be least useful on shore, whatever shore happens to them, whenever it does. She does a terrible job up on the deck.

The other trademark feature of Teffi’s writing that proved indispensable to describing the refugee condition was her ability to laugh at things that are not funny. Her ship, the Shilka, is running out of food supplies. A nearby cargo boat is loaded with food supplies but refuses to share. “At this,” Teffi writes, “the Shilka grew indignant. She opened hostilities, dispatching two lifeboats with machine guns.

“They managed to seize some provisions, but the offended steamship complained to the Jean Barthes. The French ship then bellowed menacingly at the Shilka, ‘Brigands! Bolsheviks! Explain yourselves! This instant, or else. . . .’

“With dignity and feeling, the Shilka replied that she had hungry women and children on board, and that the French had always been renowned for their chivalry.

“The Jean Barthes calmed down and immediately dispatched a lifeboat carrying chocolate, flour and condensed milk.”

The refugee must always do battle with her body, so fragile at the most inopportune times. In these stories, Teffi rarely acknowledges that she has a body, much less a previously pampered female one, enduring cattle cars, unheated rooms and ceaseless periods of waiting in the elements while in late middle age. When she describes having the Spanish flu while living in a window-full but paneless hotel room in Kiev, Teffi practices what her fellow émigré Shklovsky called “estrangement,” or “defamiliarization” — the artistic practice of describing “things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” The news of her grave illness makes the papers, and the displaced persons’ crowd, which has nothing to occupy it but the fruitless wait for the death of Bolshevism, decides to assemble at Teffi’s bedside:

“From morning until night my room was crowded with people. They must have all found it very entertaining. They brought flowers. They brought sweets, which they then ate themselves. They talked and smoked. Young couples arranged trysts on one of the windowsills. Everyone swapped theatrical and political gossip. There were people I didn’t know at all, but they smiled and helped themselves to food and drink the same as everyone else. Sometimes I felt superfluous amongst this merry crowd. Fortunately, though, they soon ceased to pay me any attention.”

The refugees of Kiev were dying from the Spanish flu, which Teffi survived despite her crowds of well-wishers. The refugees later in her journey were dying from typhus, which Teffi avoided. Her physicality comes through in rare passages devoted to the things she carried, two of which get an ode. One is her seven-stringed guitar. The other is the coat: “A woman’s sealskin coat represents an entire epoch in her life as a refugee. . . . We put these coats on as we first set out, even if this was in summer, because we couldn’t bear to leave them behind — such a coat was both warm and valuable and none of us knew how long our wanderings would last. I saw sealskin coats in Kiev and in Odessa, still looking new, their fur all smooth and glossy. Then in Novorossiisk, worn thin around the edges and with bald patches down the sides and on the elbows. In Constantinople — with grubby collars and cuffs folded back in shame. And, last of all, in Paris, from 1920 until 1922. By 1920 the fur had worn away completely, right down to the shiny black leather. The coat had been shortened to the knee and the collar and cuffs were now made from some new kind of fur, something blacker and oilier — a foreign substitute. In 1924 these coats disappeared. All that remained was odds and ends, torn scraps of memories, bits of trimming sewn onto the cuffs, collars and hems of ordinary woolen coats. Nothing more. And then, in 1925, the timid, gentle seal was obliterated by invading hordes of dyed cats. But even now when I see a sealskin coat, I remember this epoch in our lives as refugees. In freight cars, on the decks of steamers or deep in their holds, we spread our sealskin coats beneath us if it was warm or wrapped ourselves up in them if it was cold.”

Appearing early in the book, this passage contains Teffi’s eventual trajectory: After several years of wanderings, she landed in Paris, where she lived three decades, until her death in 1952. The book, however, ends mid-journey, in the uncertainty that is the hallmark of the refugee state: The author is saying her goodbye to Russia, but she cannot know where she is going next, when or how.

“Memories” is a collection of 31 interlocked untitled vignettes that Teffi released serially starting in 1928 and that was published in Russian, as a book, in Paris in 1932. Perhaps because Teffi was remembered as an exceedingly popular writer (to the extent that she was remembered at all), it took an uncommonly long time for her to be rediscovered by ­Russian-language readers. While other émigrés were published in their homeland just as the Soviet regime was collapsing in the late 1980s, Teffi did not make her literary return for another 20 years. The English translations are coming only now, and a biography is expected.

Teffi’s particular kind of dry humor, dependent on so many subtle cultural cues, presents a challenge for translators that sometimes proves insurmountable. At times the translators fall into the trap of explaining a joke, as when they write: “But life in Odessa soon began to pall. A joke is not so funny when you’re living inside it. It begins to seem more like a tragedy.” A literal translation of Teffi’s words would have worked better: “But soon everyday life in Odessa got tiresome. Life inside a joke is more tragic than it is funny.” Other times, though, Robert Chandler and the group of translators he led here create a play on words that is every bit as funny as Teffi’s — as when the author is speaking to her self-anointed manager, whose particular brand of Odessa-speak serves as reliable comic relief in “Memories”:

“I’d advertise it . . . in great big letters: An Upstanding Program. . . .”

“Outstanding, I think you mean.”

“Out where?”

“Outstanding. The program.”

“All right then — outstanding. I’m not one to argue. Why would I rock the boat over a few split hairs? And we could add: An Outstounding Triumph.”

“Astounding, I think you mean.”

“You ladies and your delicate nerves! So now you don’t want your ‘Out’ after all! Well, neither do I. After all, everyone writes ‘upstanding’ — why would I want to stand out!”

Were Teffi alive today, she would probably have something funny to say about the very long time it has taken for her writing to be published, appreciated and translated, and she would probably have the reader laughing out loud about the fortuitous timing of this translation, coming when millions of people are once again experiencing the state of being refugees, for which the English vernacular still does not have a satisfactory word.

Masha Gessen is the author, most recently, of “The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 22 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Fleeing Red. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe