The Russian literary celebrity who begged Tolstoy to spare Prince Andrei

Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous, and because it was the kind of name a ‘lucky’ fool would have; in Russia, fools were held to tell truths, albeit obliquely. ‘Teffi’ wrote for newspapers, most notably the Russian Word. By 1911 she was writing more fiction than journalism; her short story collections achieved instant popularity. In 1919 the Russian Word was closed down. Teffi was evacuated, ending up, like so many ‘lesrusses’, in Paris. She never returned to Russia, except in her stories.

Teffi’s fame evaporated almost immediately after her death in 1952. Pushkin Press has issued a newly translated selection of her stories in a neat, chunky little volume. The stories follow both Teffi and Russia through their cataclysmic half century. Despite almost unimaginable changes, the essence of both the author and her mother country survives.