Emigrant Odyssey of Nadezhda Teffi

On October 6, 1952, one of the most popular Russian writers of the 20th century, Nadezhda Teffi, died in Paris.

As reported in the monograph of a literary critic, professor of the University. James Madison Elizabeth Nitroire, dedicated to the life and work of Nadezhda Teffi, her fame in pre-revolutionary Russia was so wide that even Teffi perfumes and Teffi sweets appeared, and Nicholas II, according to rumors, wished that a literary collection dedicated to 300- anniversary of the Romanovs, consisted only of her works. However, it so happened that she spent the last 32 years of her life in exile, away from her homeland, where she was once so loved …

No wonder they say that there is nothing more permanent than something temporary: when in the fall of 1919 Teffi went on tour to Kyiv and Odessa from hungry and cold Moscow, she thought that she would return back in two or three months, but this was not was destined to never come true.

As Nadezhda Teffi later writes in her Memoirs, the Odessa entrepreneur Guskin convinced her to go on this trip:

“I convinced gloomily:

– Have you eaten bread today? Well, you won’t be tomorrow. All who can go to Ukraine. Only no one can. And I’m taking you, I pay you sixty percent of the gross collection, in the “London” hotel the best room is booked by telegraph, on the seashore, the sun is shining, you read a story or two, take money, buy butter, ham, you are full and sit in a cafe. What are you losing? Ask about me – everyone knows me. My pseudonym is Guskin. I also have a surname, but it is terribly difficult. Oh god, let’s go! The best room in the “International” hotel.

– You said – in the “London”?

Well, in London. Bad for you “International”?

Despite all the arguments of the entrepreneur, Nadezhda Teffi doubted to the last, but her “colleague in the shop”, the writer Arkady Averchenko, stopped her doubts.

“It turns out that some other pseudonym was taking him to Kyiv. Also on tour. We decided to leave together. Averchenko’s pseudonym was carrying two more actresses who were supposed to act out sketches.

– Well, you see! – exulted Guskin. “Now just make a fuss about leaving, and everything will go there like bread and butter,” says Memoirs.

As Teffi writes, the last Moscow days passed in a muddy mess:

“We lived like in a fairy tale about the Serpent Gorynych, who every year had to give twelve girls and twelve good fellows. It would seem how the people of this fairy tale could live in the world when they knew that Gorynych would devour their best children. But then, in Moscow, it was thought that, probably, the Gorynychev vassals also ran around the theaters and bought themselves a little dress. Everywhere a person can live, and I myself saw how a suicide bomber, whom the sailors dragged onto the ice to shoot, jumped over puddles so as not to get his feet wet, and turned up his collar, covering his chest from the wind. These few steps of his life he instinctively strove to pass with the greatest comfort. So are we. They bought some “last scraps”, listened for the last time to the latest operetta and the last exquisitely erotic poems, bad, good – it doesn’t matter! – just not to know, not to be aware, not to think about the fact that we are being dragged onto the ice.

After Kyiv and Odessa, Teffi went to Novorossiysk, where, on the advice of friends, she made the final decision to temporarily leave Russia.

“Unfortunately, it was not possible to find information about the last period of Teffi’s “flight” from Russia. In “Memoirs” we say goodbye to her at the moment when the ship leaves Novorossiysk. Where? Probably to Constantinople, as it is known that she was there for some time. It is impossible to establish exactly when she arrived in Paris: there is only evidence that at the beginning of 1920 the writer was already there. In February 1920, two of her poems appeared in a literary magazine in Paris. It is also known that by April of the same year, Teffi organized a literary salon (…) in a small hotel room near the Madeleine church, ”says literary critic Elisabeth Nitroir.

Unlike many other Russian emigrants, Teffi’s creative biography in a foreign land developed quite well: from 1920 to 1940, no other writer, probably, had such popularity among the emigrant environment as she did. Publishing houses, newspapers, magazines in all the emigrant colonies published her works. Teffi was a favorite in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Shanghai, Harbin, but her soul still talked about the Motherland, so near and far …

“The dust of Moscow on the ribbon of an old hat / I, as a symbol, sacredly cherish …” – these lines, conveying her mood, Teffi will take as an epigraph to his story “Nostalgia”.

Nadezhda Teffi was buried in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris, and then buried in the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois. Over the grave, Boris Zaitsev read a short eclogue on the death of a close friend, and G. Aleksinsky read a poem by Teffi herself:

He will sail at night on black sails,

A silver ship with a purple border.

But people will not understand that he sailed for me,

And they will say: “Here is the moon playing on the waves…”

Like a black seraph with three paired wings,

He will throw up sails over the starry silence.

But people will not understand that he sailed away with me,

And they will say: “Here she died today …”

Sergei Ishkov.

A photo culture.ru