A serious tease

Is there anything one can never laugh about? A question inevitably hanging over humour writing, it’s best answered by the masters of the genre who, rather than inventing jokes (a skill many possess), notice life’s winks and chuckles and tease them out of their surrounding matter, even if the latter happens to be of grave concern. Teffi was one of those writers.

Born in 1872 in St Petersburg, by her early twenties Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya was a housewife with three children stranded in a provincial town; by her early thirties she was back in the capital, a literary celebrity writing for various publications under a snappy pseudonym, her witticisms quoted ‘in the streets, in trams, in clubs, in living rooms, at student gatherings’. To get there she had abandoned her family, a step she never publicly discussed, telling her eldest daughter years later: ‘Had I remained, I would have perished.’

Teffi was generally reserved about her private life, and Edythe Haber, her first ever biographer, often admits that ‘little concrete is known about’ a particular period or event. Nevertheless, she assiduously traces scattered sources to paint the writer into a canvas of Russian literature spanning the first half of the 20th century: from the Stray Dog cabaret in pre-revolutionary Petersburg, where decadents gathered to hear Anna Akhmatova read, to Paris émigré salons, presided over by Ivan Bunin.

Teffi ended up emigrating — soon after leaving in 1919, she settled in Paris, where she died in 1952 — despite her initial enthusiasm for the Russian revolutionary movement. In 1917 she wrote, ‘the road is open to a free struggle with evil’, but her sympathy didn’t extend to the Bolsheviks. Recalling Lenin at a meeting, she compares him to ‘a leather football, squeaking and cracking at the seams, but unable to fly in the air unless it is kicked’.