It is close on 100 years since Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was murdered by a group of terrified assassins, on December 30th, 1916. The mythology surrounding this bogus holy man remains complex, if partly discredited. He was attributed with healing powers and was, for a time, a close adviser to the doomed and final Russian royal family, the Romanov dynasty, because of his ability to ease the suffering of the tsar’s young haemophilic son. Rasputin, who was never ordained as a priest yet enjoyed much success as a volatile and eccentric visionary, skilled at explaining the Bible to ordinary people, played a major role in the collapse of tsarist Russia.
It seems the most unlikely of pairings – Rasputin and Teffi.
Teffi, Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaya (1872-1952), a gifted satirist and social observer, was born into St Petersburg society and fled Russia with her family following the Bolshevik Revolution, settling into émigré life in Paris. One of several good reasons for exploring this elegant and diverse volume of writings is her first-hand account of two passing encounters with Rasputin. There is a blunt directness about this piece (titled, simply, Rasputin) that brilliantly, and understatedly, reveals how shrewd Teffi was when not attempting to be funny.
And she could be very witty. She was possessed of a lightness of touch, as is evident in The Hat (1918), that she shared with her near-contemporary Colette, who was born a year later than Teffi and survived her by two.
Had she been born at a later time, Teffi would have been a formidable journalist, if not quite in the class of Joseph Roth. As it is, her social commentary – or rather her observations of her émigré class as they attempted to assimilate into Parisian life while still retaining their old Russian hierarchies – is perceptive and unsentimental, far less whimsical than might be expected.
Before writing about Rasputin directly, she attempts to define fame. It is as if she is preparing herself for the effort of assessing him.
“How firmly and vividly his character is etched into my memory . . . And this isn’t simply because he was so very famous. In my life I’ve met many famous people, people who have truly earned their renown. Nor is it because he played such a tragic role in the fate of Russia. No. This man was unique, one of a kind, like a character out of a novel; he lived in legend, he died in legend, and his memory is cloaked in legend.”
She presents the contradictions: “A semi-literate peasant and a counsellor to the Tsar, a hardened sinner and a man of prayer, a shape-shifter with the name of God on his lips.”
The piece, dated 1932, long after the events, is written plainly, as good reportage; she may as well be giving evidence. Prior to her meetings with him, she had once glimpsed him on a train, fussily asking for tea and speaking “rather peevishly, with a broad Siberian accent”.
She had already been able to watch him in action. His relevance in Russian society was a minor phenomenon and she noted the strange, unsettling effect he had on others. As is to be expected of any good reporter, she is detached, if eager to know what others think of him.
She also makes note of an important fact: Rasputin apparently lived in fear of writers and was uneasy about how they would portray him.
Her first sighting of him is vividly described: “Dressed in a black woollen Russian kaftan and tall patent-leather boots, he was fidgeting anxiously, squirming about in his chair. One of his shoulders kept twitching. Lean and wiry and rather tall,” – which seems oddly understated as he was allegedly about 6ft 4in.
She writes that he had a straggly beard and a thin face. “His close-set, piercing, glittering little eyes were peering out furtively from under strands of greasy hair. I think these eyes were grey. The way they glittered, it was hard to be sure. Restless eyes. Whenever he said something, he would look around the whole group, his eyes piercing each person in turn, as if to say, ‘Have I given you something to think about? Are you satisfied? Have I surprised you?’ ”
Referring to the two teams of security men that tracked him – one to protect him; the second, the more sinister, entrusted with monitoring to whom he spoke and what secrets he divulged – Teffi conveys the unease which dominated Rasputin’s waking moments. She compares him with an animal, ever on the alert.
Her description of her second meeting with him is far more detailed, and their exchanges develop into a battle of wits, culminating into a weirdly prophetic passage as he announces to her with a hint of defiance: “You see, everyone wants to kill me . . . The fools don’t understand who I am. A sorcerer? Maybe I am . . . But there’s one thing they don’t understand: if they kill me, it will be the end of Russia. Remember, my clever girl: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia.”
Elsewhere, in My First Tolstoy (1920), another memory-based piece, she recalls falling in love with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, the enigmatic hero of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Teffi was 13 years old at the time and felt that she could possibly persuade Tolstoy to bring Prince Andrei back to life. "A living person dies once, but Prince Andrei was dying forever, forever."
She was brought to meet the great man. Her nanny accompanied her. Tolstoy was at home. “He was shorter than I’d expected.” Instead of pleading for Andrei to be granted immortality, she managed only to ask Tolstoy to autograph a photograph.
In one of the finest stories, Heart of a Valkyrie (1931), an old concierge's idle husband dies. Dismissed as a drunken good-for-nothing when alive, in death he belatedly acquires some pathos. The residents of the boarding house buy him flowers. "And, in the place of honour, quivering at the head of the coffin, were the orchids, poisonously corrupt and gluttonous, beings from another world, paying a visit here, in the midst of the bourgeois pink carnations, like a beguiling lady benefactress descending into a cellar to call on a sick laundress."
Comparisons with Chekhov are inevitable, but then it seems that every good short writer is likened to the master. Teffi's brisk genius lies in her prevailing impatience to get on with the story, as in Duty and Honour (1913). She is an astute social commentator and is more at home when writing about city life. The Quiet Backwater (1916) is overly folksy and unconvincing, whereas the title story (1920) is a sinister little satire, nicely barbed and eloquent.
In Thy Will, written in 1952, the year of her death, a female character, trapped at a party, is struck by an unkempt woman she sees: "As for her face, it was as if she hardly even had a face – only the unbearably strained expression of her large, weary mouth and her unpleasant dark eyes." She realises she is looking at her own reflection. It is a story that could have been written by another Russian original, Gaito Gazdanov, author of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf (1947/48).
Teffi watched, listened well and remembered. Her precise voice is her own and this mercurial volume is a singular prism to not so much a lost world as to a changing culture that learned to adapt without ever forgetting the past.
