Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi

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Teffi was a writer of astonishing, fearless intelligence. There was little, if anything, that she did not see through. No other writer, for example, has evoked the plight of the White refugees from “Sovietdom” as vividly, and with such insight, as Teffi in “The Gadarene Swine”. In this article, probably her penultimate publication on Russian soil, Teffi lets slip her mask of light humorist—and the result is terrifying. “The Gadarene Swine” was published in Odessa in March 1919, just over a month before the Whites evacuated the city, and it was not republished until 2006. It is hard to imagine any émigré journal intrepid enough to republish anything so mercilessly critical of the Whites.

Teffi was secretive and self-protective. She consistently lied about when she was born, shaving thirteen years off her age. She wrote a substantial amount of apparently autobiographical work, but without ever mentioning several of the most important events of her life. She does not tell us that a jealous admirer shot, and nearly killed, one of her lovers. Nor does she mention her second marriage, nor does she ever speak, even obliquely, of the infant son whom she abandoned when she left her husband to return to Petersburg and begin her career as a writer. All this, of course, is entirely understandable. If it surprises us, it is only because Teffi creates such a powerful illusion, when she writes in the first person, that she is chatting away entirely freely and spontaneously.

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