May 21, 1872
Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, known to the world as Teffi, the “queen of Russian satire,” was born in St. Petersburg.
Life, like fiction, is terribly tasteless. It can suddenly crumple, crush, and cut short a beautiful, vivid novel at the most ridiculous and absurd point, and ascribe an ending from Hamlet to a silly little vaudeville.
She began her literary career around age 30. She wrote satirical poems and feuilletons. She contributed to the magazine "Satyricon." Nicholas II was an admirer of hers. However, Teffi didn't know this:
Otherwise, I probably would have turned up my nose. But no, I was already gorged on fame. I felt like a national celebrity the day a messenger brought me a large box tied with a red silk ribbon… It was filled with candies wrapped in colorful paper. And on these papers was my portrait in color and the signature: "Teffi"! … I came to my senses only after I'd emptied almost the entire three-pound box. And then I felt sick. I'd gorged myself on my fame to the point of nausea.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, Teffi left first St. Petersburg and then the country. The decision was spontaneous:
The trickle of blood seen this morning at the police station gates, a slowly creeping trickle across the sidewalk, cuts off the path of life forever. You can't step over it. You can't go any further. You can turn and run.
She lived briefly in Germany and then for a long time in Paris. She opened a literary salon. In exile, the humor in the works of the "queen of Russian humor" diminished, while her philosophical observations on life increased.
A person never forgets the place where he once buried a piece of his soul. He often returns, circles around, tries, like an animal with a paw, to scratch a little from above.
Teffi published over 30 collections of poetry and prose, a third of them in exile. One of her most famous was the story "Que faire?" (What to do?). It epitomizes the émigré's confusion in a foreign land: "All this is well and good... but que faire? Fair-to-ke?" She also wrote memoirs and literary portraits of famous people.
Living in a joke is not fun, but rather tragic.
She died in 1952. She was buried in Paris.