Please join the Pushkin Club for the launch of And Time Was No More, the long-awaited new translation of Teffi’s work, and the fifth collection of her stories to be translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and their colleagues. And Time Was No More sets out to give a sense of Teffi’s life journey as a whole, and includes previously untranslated stories alongside more famous work. It will be published by Pushkin Press in April 2024.

“There are writers who muddy their own water, to make it seem deeper.  Teffi could not be more different: the water is entirely transparent, yet the bottom is barely visible” – Georgy Adamovich, 1931

Teffi (pseudonym of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya) was born in St Petersburg in 1872. Her finest works are her short stories and Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea, a witty yet tragic account of her last journey across Russia and what is now Ukraine, before going by boat to Istanbul in summer 1919.    

In pre-revolutionary Russia, Teffi was a superstar. Candies and perfumes were named after her and her admirers included not only several of the greatest writers among her contemporaries, but also both Lenin and Tsar Nicholas II. After the Revolution, her stories were published and her plays performed throughout the Russian diaspora. 

During the first decades after her death, however, she was almost forgotten: in part because of prejudice against women writers; in part because she was thought lightweight (critics had always focussed more on her wit more than on her depth of emotional understanding); and in part because both Western and Soviet scholars tended to ignore émigré literature. 

Nowadays, her work is being published widely in Russia, as well as being translated into many languages. A more recent exile, Boris Akunin, has summed her up well: “Teffi’s grace and indomitable courage are captivating. A cruel century dragged her through hardships of every kind – civil war, poverty and exile – but not once did it make her bow down or whimper. Teffi’s pre-revolutionary stories are entertaining. But her comic accounts of her travels and travails in Purgatory provide solid evidence that life can conquer death in ways unknown to science. We can learn from Nadezhda Alexandrovna how best to respond to adversity. Although it’s better, of course, if adversities pass us by."

Robert Chandler’s translations and co-translations from Russian include Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, Hamid Ismailov’s Central Asian novel The Railway and many works by Teffi, Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman. He is the (co)-editor and main translator of three anthologies of Russian literature for Penguin Classics: of Russian short stories, of Russian magic tales, and of Russian poetry.

His translation of Apollinaire’s “Caterpillar” has featured as a “Poem on the Underground.”

Work hard, poets, work with good cheer:
Work leads to wealth and freedom from fear;
And butterflies, for all their graces,
Are merely caterpillars who persevere.

Dr Catherine Brown is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Research School at Northeastern University London. Her research is in the fields of modernism, Anglo-Russian literary relations, D. H. Lawrence studies, and (more recently) vegan literary studies. She is a Vice-President of the Lawrence Society, and in 2020 co-edited with Susan Reid The Edinburgh Companion to D.H. Lawrence and the Arts. In 2022 she wrote the chapter on ‘Modernism’ for The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies. For Literary Review she reviewed Teffi’s Subtly Worded and Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (trans. Robert Chandler with others), as well as Edythe Haber’s biography Teffi: A Life of Letters and of Laughter. 

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