Sometimes when you read a book, the author's personality shines through so strongly that convinced you would hit it off immediately, you wish you could somehow meet. So it was with this collection of writings by Teffi.

Probably such a meeting would be as humiliating as the one the thirteen year old Teffi had with Tolstoy. Recounted in the short story "My First Tolstoy", (1920), Teffi captures perfectly the awkwardness of such a meeting when everything you pictured saying and doing condenses into the briefest of encounters. How else could it be when you plan to ask the great author to save Prince Andrei?

While it's easy to relate to the stories from childhood, seeing yourself in the anecdotes, it's a completely different matter with "Rasputin". Written in 1924, Teffi's encounters with Rasputin are still fresh enough in memory to enable her to convey a chilling picture of a sexual predator, a 'sorcerer' as she describes him, a man who has asked particularly to meet her. Reading of his murder, she remembers his prediction:

...there's one thing they don't know: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia.
Remember me then! Remember me!

She did.

Much of Teffi's fame in Russia was as a satirist. Satire usually has a short shelf life. However, reminiscences such as "New Life", recalling the politics of the Petersburg newspaper where she worked for awhile, are just as relevant to any office setting today, and still inspire a chuckle.

Teffi left Russian in 1919, just after writing "The Gadarene Swine", a devastating critique of the Whites. She didn't fully realize at the time that she would never return. Perhaps saddest of all are her reflections written in exile, such as "Ilya Repin", a sketch of a celebrated Russian artist living in Finland. His early portrait of her had disappeared, probably to the US. She wrote in 1951, a year before she died

I've never been able to hold on to anything. Neither portraits, nor poems dedicated to me, nor paintings I've been given, nor letters from interesting people. Nothing at all.

There is a little more preserved in my memory, but even this is gradually, or even rather quickly, losing its meaning, fading, slipping away from me, wilting and dying.
It's sad to wander about the graveyard of my tired memory, where all hurts have been forgiven, where every sin has been atoned for, every riddle unriddled and twilight quietly cloaks the crosses, now no longer upright, of graves I once wept over.

I delightful discovery! Another fantastic woman writer to add to my collection. I cannot wait to read more of her works! ( )

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/glimpses-of-a-lost-worl... ( )