In the comments to previous translations, brought up Teffi multiple times and nudged me to finally translate some of her works. Even Teffi’s non-fiction featured dialogue and as playful as her short stories, so despite I’m starting with what seems to be non-fiction, you’d be able to very well grasp her voice and sense of humour.
To know each other a bit better, Teffi was the pseudonym of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya (1872–1952), one of the most popular and influential satirical writers in early twentieth-century Russia. Many of her contemporaries naturally compared her to Chekhov by saying “Chekhov in a skirt”, which is no surprise in the literary scene dominated by men openly admitting her sense of humour was anomalous for a woman. Early in her career, Teffi herself admitted to be inspired by Chekhov yet developed her own unique voice, mayhap a bit more sardonic, more political, slightly more condescending, than Chekhov’s. “Proving the haters wrong”, she rapidly acquired enormous fame and became a literary celebrity in Russia and beyond and was known, both before and after the Revolution, for her witty feuilletons, humorous short stories, and plays unearthing, admired and beloved by readers of various backgrounds—remarkably, both Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin. After the 1917, like many of the big literary figures of that time, Teffi emigrated to Paris, where she also became a central figure in the émigré literary scene. Her keen psychological insight and ability to find humour in human folly made her writing timelessly relevant.
I’m going to share two essays translated by me, one today, “Дураки” (translated by me as “Midwits”, will explain below), and one later this month, “Человекообразные” (“Humanoids”), both explore the same topic of social critique that is so popular nowadays, including on Substack, as means of bridging the proverbial now with proverbial olden days, to see if anything has changed at all and how.