Teffi (III) — 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.
We sailed into Novorossiisk.
What an enormous port!
Jetty after jetty, one after another.
Cranes towered everywhere, like the necks of gigantic black waterbirds. And endless sheds, depots, warehouses . . .
And people, crowds of people, all over the waterfront and the landing stages.
At first I thought they were passengers waiting for a steamer. But, after walking about a little, I soon saw that they weren’t waiting there—they were living there. They had rigged up tents out of baskets and pieces of cloth, hung up their ragged things—and there they now lived.
There were old women roasting scraps of food on braziers.
And there were half-naked children playing with mutton bones and bits of broken bottles. Swarthy children with tousled black hair.
In front of each tent stood a pole, and tied to this pole was a cluster or garland of garlic.
These people were Armenian refugees. They had been in Novorossiisk for a long time and had no idea where they would be sent next. There had been an outbreak of typhus in the city and many of them were sick. Children were dying of fever. The clusters of garlic were there to ward off infection. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and a variety of diseases all strongly dislike the smell of garlic. As do I myself; I entirely understand these ghosts, vampires and werewolves.
These refugees were leading a strange life.
They had been driven here from one place, and they would soon be driven on to some other place. And though all they owned in the world might be a few rags and a frying pan, they seemed to be finding their lives quite tolerable. I sensed neither despondency nor even impatience.
They bickered, laughed, wandered through the camp to visit one another, and smacked their children. Some were even selling dried fish and pressed mutton.
A boy was blowing on a clay whistle and two little girls were dancing, their arms around each other.
No one grumbled, worried, or asked too many questions. They accepted their present life as something quite normal.
I saw one woman in a torn dress made from silk—not long ago she must have been rich. She was showing her neighbour how she’d stretched a shawl over a rope. She was very pleased with herself. And if the shawl had been a quarter—yes, just one quarter—as long again (she demonstrated several times with her palm how much more material she needed), then she could have completed their tent.
She was just that quarter of a shawl away from total comfort.
It’s true, everything is relative. Her neighbor could not help feeling envy—she herself had only a garland of garlic with which to protect her home from vampires, disease, and prying eyes.
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. 223-224.