Teffi (1872–1952)

Teffi was the pen name of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, born into a gentry family active in the St. Petersburg intelligentsia. Her sister Mirra Lokhvitskaya also became a notable Russian poet. At about age 18, Nadezhda married Wladyslav Buczynski, a Polish-born lawyer with whom she had three children, but the union was unhappy. After 10 years, she left her husband and children on their country estate and returned to St. Petersburg, where she became a successful writer. She became so celebrated that candies and perfume were named after her. During a period of radical fervor after the 1905 Revolution, she contributed to the first Bolshevik journal, The New Life, whose editorial board included Maxim Gorky and Zinaida Gippius. She also wrote for the Satiricon magazine and the popular journal Russkoye Slovo (Russian Word). She first used the pseudonym "Teffi" in 1907 with the publication of her one-act play The Woman Question. Teffi grew to hate the Bolsheviks because she believed they had no respect for culture, and had to leave St. Petersburg after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Eventually, she settled in Paris, where she contributed her work to Russian-language newspapers. She also published several book-length collections of short stories and poems, a volume of memoirs entitled Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (serialized 1928-1930), and her only novel, An Adventure Novel (1932).