Laughter is now in style […] Books of humor go through three editions in three or four months and demand for them keeps rising. Humor magazines are alluded to even in speeches delivered under the bell of the State Duma. Theatrical entrepreneurs are longing for a good merry comedy and beg tearfully, “Why, write something, the kind of thing that makes your throat begin to tickle with laughter!”[13]
The demand for laughter coincided perfectly with Teffi’s special gift, and it accounts for the renown she achieved during her final decade in Russia. The first print organ that spread her fame was Satirikon (Satyricon), the best Russian humor magazine of the early twentieth century, conceived of in 1908 by Arkady Averchenko (who in Memories is Teffi’s traveling companion from Moscow to Kiev). With its very talented staff of writers and artists, Satirikon was a resounding success, and Teffi and Averchenko became its most celebrated writers. Her popularity grew still greater in 1909 when she became a feuilletonist for the Moscow-based Russkoe slovo (Russian Word), the most widely read and highly regarded newspaper in Russia, whose circulation reached over a million by 1917. Her Sunday columns—which included both topical feuilletons and stories—appeared in Russkoe slovo until it was closed by the Bolsheviks in 1917.
Teffi published her first books in 1910, and they reflect the two sides of her talent. The first, Seven Fires, is a volume of poetry plus a play written in orientalized prose; the second was entitled Humorous Stories.[14] The poetry received mixed reviews, but the stories were universally praised by critics, both in the elite and popular press. Mikhail Kuzmin, in his review in the prestigious Apollon (Apollo), favorably contrasted Teffi’s natural Russian humor in the Chekhov manner to the “fantastic lack of verisimilitude” of Averchenko’s “American” variety.[15] Teffi published no more books of poetry in Russia, but Humorous Stories was followed almost yearly by new prose collections, all of which were published in multiple editions and highly praised by critics, who often deemed Teffi the best humorous writer of the time. Typical are a reviewer’s comments on her 1914 collection, Smoke without Fire; asserting that Teffi “undoubtedly occupies first place” among contemporary humorists, he declared her humor “purely Russian, sly and good-natured,” and concluded: “Teffi’s style is refined and simple, the dialogue—her favorite form—is lively and unforced; the action unfolds quickly, without superfluous details, and sincere merriment is effortlessly conveyed to the reader.”[16] Some critics noted the sadness intermingled with Teffi’s comedy, her “almost elegiac humor” depicting “gray, everyday life….”[17] Her more somber side is reflected particularly in The Lifeless Beast (1915), her best collection of the teens, in which the serious mood predominates. Teffi’s position as a woman writer—and more unusually, a woman humorist—aroused contradictory responses. One critic found “something typically feminine in that observant mockery with which she illuminates every trifle of everyday life,” whereas her fellow Satyriconian, Arkady Bukhov, distinguished her from the usual run of despised women writers: “In general Teffi writes so cleverly and beautifully that even her enemies would not call her a woman writer.”[18]
During the revolutionary year of 1917, political events began again to figure centrally in Teffi’s stories and feuilletons. Exultation over the February Revolution and the overthrow of the monarchy is reflected in the story “The Average Man,” whose title character is now able to shout fearlessly “the policeman is a fool.” He explains to his wife: “I felt like it and I screamed. That’s the way I am. I! The free citizen Gerasim Ivanych Shchurkin.”[19] Such optimism was not to last long, however, in part because of the Provisional Government’s inability to implement its liberal program during wartime, but, on a more fundamental level, because Teffi’s dream of class unity, expressed in 1905, was clearly unrealizable. In a June 1917 feuilleton titled “Deserters,” she criticized the intelligentsia for their anxiety over the violent unrest among the peasantry. She accused them of expecting a miracle—that “the same people [narod] who for centuries were stupefied with vodka, oppressed, crushed by lack of rights, by illiteracy, poverty, superstition, and hunger,” would at once reveal “a great and shining soul….”[20] Acknowledging the outrages, she nevertheless branded as “deserters” those who wished to avoid “participation in the difficult and great exploit of building a new life.” Even if their worst fears prove to be justified, she concludes, “and instead of a triumphal chariot only black corpses will be driven along our great path, may each one of us be able to say: ‘My forces were weak and small, but I gave of them totally. And I did not renounce and did not flee. I was not a deserter!’”[21]
Teffi’s revolutionary sympathies, however, emphatically did not extend to the Bolsheviks. Her disdain for Lenin and his party, which dated back to 1905, is expressed powerfully in a feuilleton of late June 1917, in which she gave a withering portrait of Lenin: “Average height, gray complexion, completely ‘ordinary.’ Only his forehead is not good, very prominent, stubborn, heavy, not inspired, not seeking, not creative….” The “sincere and honest preacher of the great religion of socialism” (as she rather surprising calls him) lacks “the fiery tongue of the gift of the Holy Spirit…, there is no inspiration in him, no flight, and no fire.”[22] For Lenin’s followers she expressed unadulterated contempt, but at once makes clear that she has not rejected socialism as such: “Leninists, Bolsheviks, anarchists and communists, thugs, registered housebreakers—what a muddle! What a Satanic vinaigrette! What immense work—to raise once more and cleanse from all this garbage the great idea of socialism!”
Teffi criticized the Bolsheviks for their inability to correctly judge the movement of history, but revealed a stunning lack of foresight when she asked rhetorically: “Is not the word ‘Bolshevik’ now discredited forever and irrevocably?” For only a few months later, on the night of October 24–25, they carried out their bloodless coup in Petrograd. In their effort to solidify their position, the Bolsheviks quickly acted to stifle the opposition press, shutting down Russkoe slovo and other unfriendly periodicals in late November 1917. The staff writers, including Teffi, did not succumb easily, however, for in January 1918, they opened another newspaper, which they called Novoe slovo (New Word). When it was closed on April 2, the determined journalists opened yet another newspaper, Nashe slovo (Our Word) on April 11, which lasted until July 6. Satirikon (now Novyi Satirikon, New Satirikon) eked out its existence until August 1918, with Teffi’s works appearing to the very end.
Life in Petrograd grew intolerable, both materially and morally, during the months following the October Revolution. Aside from a pervasive atmosphere of fear among the Bolsheviks’ political and class enemies, during the bitterly cold winter of 1917–18 the city was suffering from severe shortages of food and fuel. By March 1918, things had reached such a pass that Teffi declared Petrograd dead: “We live in a dead city… On the streets are the corpses of horses, dogs, and quite frequently of people… At night dark, frightened figures steal up to the horse corpses and carve out a piece of meat.”[23] She writes of arrests: “Someone released from a Petrograd prison tells about executions… Nobody knows anything for certain, but in the dead city they are always talking about death and always believe in it.”[24] In a piece written in Kiev the following October, Teffi quotes a typical conversation between two Petrograd acquaintances:
16
N. Lerner, “N. Teffi. ‘Dym bez ognia’,”
17
Anastas’ia Chebotarevskaia, “Teffi. ‘I stalo tak…’,”
18
I. V[asilev]ski, “ ’Nichego podobnogo’. Novaia kniga Teffi,”
22
“Nemnozhko o Lenine,”
23
“Iz mertvogo goroda,”