Teffi (I) — Memories From Moscow to the Black Sea
Teffi (1871 – 1952) was the pen name for Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, a poet, playwright, novelist, and generally well-known cultural figure, born in St. Petersburg in the Russian Imperial Empire. In the early aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, she embarked upon a journey to Odesa by ship, seeking to escape the post-apocalyptic climate of the post-revolutionary world, and intensifying suppression of cultural and political freedoms. Memories is an autobiographical account of Teffi’s departure from Russia – a journey from which she would never return.
Excerpt:
The gray dusty men in the hold had long fallen silent. They were not merry. They had been through too much to be merry. They slept soundly and simply, like peasants at harvest time who know they must sleep if they are to get through the heavy labor of the coming day.
The Shilka creaked and swayed. A black wave crashed dully against her side, then bounced back. It shattered the rhythm of the song; it was alien to the small, cheerful light shining out from the saloon into the dark night. The wave had its own deep and awful life; it had its own power and will, about which we knew nothing. Not seeing or understanding us, not knowing us at all, it could lift us, drag us, hurl us about. It was elemental; it could destroy.
A large star blazed like a bonfire. Like a small moon, it cast a path of broken gold across the sea.
"That’s Sirius,” said a voice close by.
A young boy—a stoker.
White against his sooty face, his eyes were gazing intently into the sky. His shirt was caked brown with dirt. Through its open collar I could see a bronze cross on a grimy string.
“That’s Sirius.”
“You know the stars?” I asked.
He faltered.
“A little. I’m a sailor . . . A stoker . . . When you’re at sea, you often have to look up into the sky.”
Explanation:
Russian author Teffi’s Memories (released as a serialized publication between 1928 – 1930) explores the Black Sea (and its coastal borders) in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution – an event that altered the course of human history and was responsible for unquantifiable suffering and dislocation. Teffi reflects interestingly upon the form and force of the Black Sea waters – presented often, as she flees her Russian homeland by steamship, through a lens of the divine or supernatural, or as a deliverance of earthly retribution for the sins and cruelties of the human world. Across each excerpt, she ruminates upon a maritime existence of total detachment, or release from the apocalyptic confines of the shore. The sea functions broadly as a powerful and multi-faceted metaphor – illuminating volatile experiences of change, the inevitable progression of time, and sense of cruel indifference, on the part of the natural world, to human affairs.
Citation: Teffi. Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea. Trans. Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson, and Irina Steinberg, introduction by Edythe Haber, New York Review Books, 2016. pp. 217-218.