Other worlds, p.29
Other Worlds, page 29
Teffi. Memories. Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson, and Irene Steinberg. New York: New York Review Books, 2016.
———. Subtly Worded. Translated from the Russian by Anne Marie Jackson, Robert Chandler, Clare Kitson, and Natalia Wase. London: Pushkin Press, 2014.
———. Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi. Translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Rose France, and Anne Marie Jackson. New York: New York Review Books, 2016.
In Russian
Maximov, Sergey. Nechistaia, nevedomaia i krestnaia sila. Moscow: Kniga, 1989, first published 1903.
Teffi. Izbrannye proizvedeniya, 7 volumes. Moscow: Lakom, 1999.
Zelenin, D. K. Vostochnoslavianskaya Etnografiya. Moscow: Nauka, 1991.
NOTES
Foreword
1. Georgy Adamovich, review of The Book of June, Illiustrirovannaya Rossiya (April 25, 1931).
2. Teffi, Izbrannye proizvedeniya (Moscow: Lakom, 1999), 2:9. Edythe C. Haber quotes a similar passage in Teffi: A Life of Letters and of Laughter (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019), 152.
3. Teffi, “Katerina Petrovna,” ibid., 4:45.
4. For more about Witch, including a discussion of “Seemings,” which is set in a Siberian mining settlement and is omitted from Other Worlds, see Robert Chandler in The Literary Encyclopedia, available at www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=38906.
5. Teffi, Izbrannye proizvedeniya, 2:374.
6. Neither “Happiness” nor “Daisy” are included in Other Worlds. For more about The Lifeless Beast, see Robert Chandler in The Literary Encyclopedia, available at www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID =38906.
7. Haber, Teffi: A Life of Letters and of Laughter, 18.
8. Ibid., 152.
9. Edythe C. Haber, “The Roots of NEP Satire: The Case of Teffi and Zoshchenko,” in The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921–1928 (Idyllwild, CA: Charles Schlacks, 2007), 1:92.
10. Ivanov’s comments about Teffi are often misquoted. See, for example, Teffi, Izbrannye proizvedeniya, 2:5. Haber writes (personal email, June 25, 2020) that she found in her files a note of Ivanov’s review in Sovetskii patriot of Russkii sbornik (1946) where he writes, “The first Teffi is a cultured, intelligent, good writer. The second is an unrepeatable phenomenon of Russian literature, a true miracle that people will still be wondering at in a hundred years’ time, crying and laughing at once. (‘Pervaya Teffi kul'turnyi, umnyi, khoroshii pisatel'. Vtoraya—nepovtorimoye yavlenie russkoi literaturi, podlinnoye chudo, kotoroy cherez sto let budut udivlyat'sya, smeyas' pri etom do slez.’)” It is not entirely clear which Teffi is the first, and which the second. It seems likely, though, that the first is the more serious Teffi and the second the more comic Teffi.
Kishmish
1. Nyanya is often translated as “nanny,” but the two words are not equivalent. See “A Note on Russian Names.”
2. The Russian Orthodox refer to the first week of Lent as Clean Week. The faithful are expected to undergo spiritual cleansing through fasting, prayer, repentance, begging forgiveness of their neighbor, and taking the Eucharist. Throughout the six weeks of Lent, vegetable oils are substituted for butter and animal fats.
3. Teffi also uses this nickname in “Love” (“Lyubov,” from the collection Gorodok), one of the finest of her semiaubiographical stories. Robert Chandler’s translation of this is included in Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005).
Soul in Bond
1. Russians often used to drink tea by putting a cube of sugar into their mouth and sucking tea through the cube.
2. A tall domed loaf baked only at Easter. It is sweet and always glazed with white icing; often it is decorated with flowers.
Confession
1. Kissel is made of pureed fruit or peas thickened with potato starch. Depending on the proportion of starch, it can be the consistency of a smoothie, a soup, or a blancmange.
2. Nyanya seems to be alluding to one of the many variants of a common folk belief that if you bridle a witch and ride her all through the night, she will turn into a horse and cease to make trouble. See Linda Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 194–95.
3. The eighth commandment in the Anglican and Orthodox traditions, seventh in the Catholic tradition.
4. Confession in a church or a monastery often took place behind a wooden screen. Penitent and confessor stood in full view of each other, while those waiting their turn stood on the other side of the screen. The confessor would stand beside an analogion—a wooden lectern supporting a cross and a gospel. The penitent would stand too, often with bowed head. After reminding the penitent that they are confessing to the Lord, not to him, the confessor would ask a series of questions. The penitent would then kneel while the priest placed the end of his stole over the penitent’s head and pronounced the absolution and blessing.
Yavdokha
1. Dr. A. D. Nurenberg was a well-known physician. In the autumn of 1914, shortly before this story was first published, he and Teffi were the subject of a major public scandal. Nurenberg was visiting Teffi when a man stormed in and fired five shots at him, hitting him in the neck, hand, and arm. He shot at Teffi, but missed. He then turned himself over to the police, saying he had warned Nurenberg not to go on visiting Teffi. Edythe Haber writes, “Nothing more is known about Teffi’s relations with Dr. Nurenberg, but when he died in April 1917 (apparently of unrelated causes), she wrote an obituary describing his total dedication to his calling and his miraculous diagnoses”; Teffi, Izbrannye proizvedeniya (Moscow: Lakom, 1999), 72.
2. A standard measure of distance until the Revolution. Slightly longer than a kilometer.
A Quiet Backwater
1. Compare: “Dal’ states that among the peasants [the Annunciation] was the most important religious festival. On this day and at Easter the souls in hell are not tormented. You may not spin or weave on this day, nor plait your hair, nor heat the stove, nor cook hot meals. Moles are blind because they dug on this day and cuckoos have no nest because they made nests on this day”; William Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia (London: Sutton, 1999), 132.
2. The day after Pentecost, “Whit Monday” in English. According to Russian belief, this was the day that the earth was created; it was wrong to dig in the earth since she was now pregnant with the harvest.
The Heart
1. Teffi is referring to Johann Strauss’s operetta A Night in Venice. Among the characters is a “fisher-girl.”
2. Fedosya’s physical appearance—her “sharp eyes” and “sharp nose”—would have been thought witchlike. And since fishing was a male occupation and a fishing net was believed to have magical properties, the villagers would have had reason to be suspicious of Fedosya. They may have thought that she could use this net to place a hex on someone or even to capture a demon whom she could then use as her servant (my thanks to Christine Worobec and Veronica Muskheli for their help with this note).
3. In tsarist Russia, most Orthodox Christians confessed and took Communion only once a year, usually during Lent. Someone very devout might also confess and take Communion during one of the three other major fasts, but it was unusual for a layperson to take Communion more than twice in a year. Preparation for Communion was a serious matter. Before going to confession, a penitent was expected to abstain from certain foods for several days, to cut back on secular activities, and to pray in private or listen to special prayers in church. After confession, the penitent would fast until partaking of the Eucharist during Divine Liturgy the following day.
Solovki
1. From the second half of the nineteenth century there was a huge increase in the number of pilgrims paying short visits to Solovki. The Archangel Michael, acquired in 1887, was one of three steamships operated by the monastery. The journey from Arkhangelsk took seventeen hours. The pilgrimage season started late in June and the most important feast day was August 8, the name day of Saints Zosima and Savvaty, the monastery’s two founders.
2. A penance would include going to all services, a prescribed number of bodily prostrations, and the repetition of additional prayers.
3. An elite secondary school for boys.
4. To this day, pilgrims visiting a holy site often buy items of clothing for their burial. And it is customary for the deceased to wear a belt—into which a prayer has been woven—during an Orthodox burial, since he or she will need it when resurrected. Belts are symbolically important in Russian culture, suggesting order and dignity.
5. The Russian-speaking inhabitants of the country’s northern coast of European Russia. They have developed a specific culture as a result of interaction and interbreeding with the region’s indigenous peoples.
6. Probably these women had prayed to the monastery’s patron saints and vowed to send their sons to Solovki (which did not accept women except as pilgrims on short visits) if their prayer was granted. The boys would serve as laborers, also receiving some spiritual teaching. They were not trainee monks; in a year or two they would return to their homes.
7. To this day, some recluse monks on Solovki keep to a rule of complete silence, living alone and devoting their lives to prayer. It seems that some of Teffi’s pilgrims did not understand this. It is also possible that the mutual incomprehension resulted from people speaking different dialects.
8. Their walk echoes the Procession of the Cross around the outside of a church on Easter Eve and certain other feast days.
9. Mustard was considered an aphrodisiac.
10. Demons in Russian iconography were usually depicted as shaggy, with webbed feet and twisting tails.
11. Being on the west wall, the Last Judgment was the last set of images a worshiper would see as he or she left the church; this makes the monks’ surrender to temptation all the more ironic.
12. A lightly fermented drink made from rye bread.
13. The official is quoting from Psalm 37:45 (according to the Orthodox numbering), which is in the morning prayers for lay readers. In the King James Bible this is translated: “For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease: and there is no soundness in my flesh” (Psalm 38:7).
14. The period that these short-term visitors were allowed to stay. During these three days they were expected to avoid meat and dairy products; they were then ready to receive Communion.
15. In the mid-1880s the poet Konstantin Sluchevsky described Pomor women as “well dressed regardless of their social and economic status, wearing long colourful sarafany, and beautifully decorated headwear. [ . . . ] A distinctive feature of women’s clothing in some parts of Pomor’e was an extensive use of pearls extracted from local rivers.” Available at www.openbookpublishers.com/htmlreader/978-1-78374-544-9/ch8.xhtml.
16. See note 4. In their article “The Sea Is Our Field,” Masha Shaw and Natalie Wahnsiedler write: “Sluchevsky was particularly impressed by the light and skilful movements of Pomor women in their long and richly decorated dresses as they steered their boats in rough and roaring waters”; in David G. Anderson, Dimtry V. Arzyutov, and Sergei S. Alimov, eds., Life Histories of Etnos Theory in Russia and Beyond (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019).
17. This marks the beginning of the most solemn part of the Liturgy. It is sung as the clergy—accompanied, it is believed, by angels—enter the sanctuary through the Holy Doors. It ends, “Let us now lay aside all earthly care.”
18. The word means “whither.” Teffi evidently chose it both for its sound and for its meaning. Unable to reproduce both, we have transliterated, reproducing the sound alone.
19. The celebration of Christ’s resurrection through the mystery of the Eucharist was believed to provoke fear among demons, which in turn could prompt fits among those in a state of demonic possession.
20. Varvara’s “Aida!” echoes the first woman’s “Kuda!” And the word da means “yes.”
21. Varvara would not normally have received Communion before completing her penance. Now, however, she is thought to be possessed and so not responsible for her state. In the words of John Chrysostom, “They that be possest in that they are tormented of the devil are blameless and will never be punished with torment for that: but they who approach unworthily the holy Mysteries shall be given over to everlasting torments”; quoted in The Doctrine of the Russian Church, R. W. Blackmore, trans. (Aberdeen: A. Brown and Co., 1845), 223n. And so Varvara is given the Eucharist: a small piece of bread dipped in wine.
22. Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724–1783) was born, like Varvara and her husband, in the province of Novgorod. After serving for seven years as a bishop, he retired because of poor health to the monastery of Zadonsk, beyond the Don River. Eighty years after his death, he was canonized. Varvara imagines herself and Semyon making a pilgrimage to Zadonsk, stopping at other holy sites on the way.
The Book of June
1. Alexey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817–1875) wrote lyric poems, acute satires, and verse plays on historical, religious, and legendary themes. He was not closely related to the famous novelist.
2. Viktor Vasnetsov (1848–1926) was one of the group of artists known as the Wanderers or Peredvizhniki. Many of his paintings are on themes from Russian folktales and the old oral verse epics known as bylinas.
Wild Evening
1. The Russian khrust at one time referred to a particular silver coin. For Afanasy, though, it is probably just a slang word for “ruble.”
2. Visitors to a holy well often made donations for prayers to be said both on behalf of the living—most often the sick—and on behalf of the dead.
3. An abbreviation of a formula found in old Russian bylinas: “If you wish for good, drink to the bottom. If you don’t wish for good, don’t drink to the bottom.” (“Esli khosh' dobra, tak pei do dna. A ne khosh dobra, tak ne pei do dna!”)
4. According to the ethnographer Dmitry Zelenin, Russian peasants saw some illnesses—especially fevers—as manifestations of the unclean dead. His description of a fever (likhoradka) is similar to Teffi’s image of Cattle Plague: “with long, uncovered hair, without a belt, dressed in white like the dead”; in Dmitry Zelenin, Izbrannye trudy (Moscow: Indrik, 1994), 1:279.
Shapeshifter
1. An organ of local government. Established in 1864, three years after the emancipation of the serfs, these democratically elected councils were central to the liberal movement during the last fifty years of tsarism. They were responsible for building schools, hospitals, roads, etc.
Witch
1. There is nothing unusual about this. It was conventional for a social inferior to kiss a superior on the shoulder. In return, the superior would kiss the top of his or her head.
2. In each Russian province there was an Assembly of the Nobility, headed by an elected Marshal of the Nobility.
Vurdalak
1. The Russian equivalent of the biblical Abner. He first appears in the Book of Samuel as the commander of Saul’s army.
The House Spirit
1. For the story of the prophet Elisha raising the son of the Shunammite, see 2 Kings 4:18–37. Verse 34 reads, “And he went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands: and stretched himself upon the child; and the flesh of the child waxed warm.”
2. Priscilla Roosevelt writes, “The nanny’s replacement by the first governess or tutor marked the cultural divide between a Russian infancy and a European childhood. [. . .] The nanny’s fairy tales and fantastic visions were replaced by moral fables, in which children’s virtue was tested and evil punished”; in Life on the Russian Country Estate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 181.
3. When upset, a house spirit often caused trouble in the stables. House spirits could not bear the smell of goats, so a goat’s presence helped to protect the horses.
4. The poem Kolya reads aloud is a free translation of a poem by Byron that begins:
When I dream that you love me, you’ll surely forgive;
Extend not your anger to sleep;
For in visions alone your affection can live;
I rise, and it leaves me to weep.
Leshachikha
1. A female forest spirit. See the afterword.
2. “That charming little savage.”
3. Polish for “mademoiselle” or “little lady.”
4. “If you believe . . .”
5. “How I adore her and her wheat-blonde hair . . .”
6. See Eugene Onegin, act 6, scene 32, Stanley Mitchell, trans. (New York: Penguin, 2008):
But now, as in a house forsaken,
All it contains is dark and still,
A home forever silent, chill,
The windows shuttered, chalked and vacant,
The mistress vanished from the place
To God knows where, without a trace.
In other countries, too, windows are sometimes whitewashed if a house or shop is left vacant. As well as being a cheap antibacterial, the whitewash reduces heat from sunshine and deters the inquisitive.
About the House
1. Compare Zelenin: “For Ukrainians and Belorussians, a witch’s main activity is stealing milk from cows. If a witch milks a cow on the Feast of the Annunciation, on Easter, or on Saint George’s day (April 23), only she can then continue to get milk from that cow. The milk flows from an aperture in one of the logs of the witch’s home, if you turn on a tap there”; in D. K. Zelenin, Vostochnoslavianskaya Etnografiya (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 421.
2. See the afterword. Teffi may have in mind the belief that some of these spirits are the unclean dead—former human beings who no longer have souls because they were denied a Christian burial.
