Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya) — writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Teffi was the pen name of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, born on 21 May (9 May, Old Style) 1872, in St Petersburg according to most sources; the current English Wikipedia places her birth on the family estate in Volhynia, and her birth year is given variously from 1871 to 1876. Her father, Alexander Lokhvitsky, was a lawyer, a legal scholar and the editor of a law journal. Her elder sister, Mirra Lokhvitskaya (1869-1905), became a celebrated poet.
After an early marriage to Władysław Buczyński, she began publishing: her first poems appeared in 1901 and her first story in 1905, both under her own name. From 1907 she signed herself Teffi, a pseudonym whose origin she and others explained in different ways. Her stories and sketches, written for the daily Russkoye slovo and the humour magazines Satirikon and Novy Satirikon alongside Arkady Averchenko, were sharp, funny and often sad observations of ordinary people. In 1910 she published both a book of poems, Seven Fires, and the first volume of her Humorous Stories, and by the 1910s she was among the most widely read writers in Russia, admired by writers from Bunin to Zoshchenko and, it was said, by both the last tsar and Lenin; there were Teffi perfumes and Teffi sweets.
In 1918, after an early sympathy for the revolution had turned to disenchantment, she accepted an invitation to give readings in Ukraine, travelling with Averchenko's touring party to German-occupied Kiev. She did not return. When Kiev changed hands she moved on to Odessa and then to Novorossiysk, from where in 1919 she sailed for Constantinople; in 1920 she reached Paris, where she spent the rest of her life. Her account of that journey, Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea, was serialised in Paris between 1928 and 1930.
In emigration she remained one of the most popular writers of the Russian diaspora, publishing in the émigré press, writing plays and collections of stories, and her only novel, Adventure Novel (1932). In the Soviet Union her work was banned from the 1920s until 1967. She lived through the German occupation of France in Biarritz. She died in Paris on 6 October 1952 and is buried at the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.
Long admired in the émigré world but little known abroad, her work found new readers in the twenty-first century through English translations and Edythe Haber's biography, Teffi: A Life of Letters and Laughter.
Tracing the roots — St Petersburg (or the family estate in Volhynia Governorate)
Born Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya in the Russian Empire, probably in St Petersburg, in 1872, she became one of the most widely read Russian writers of the 1910s under the pen name Teffi, left Russia via Odessa and Constantinople in 1919 and settled in Paris.
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St Petersburg (or the family estate in Volhynia Governorate). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Humour is the weapon of the unarmed. And the weapon of those who have already lost everything."