After the 1919 Revolution but before the Bolsheviks have solidified their control. Fascinating politically, as some areas are still White and these are the ones to which artists gravitate. Teffi is artistic, bourgeoisie and seeks artistic freedom.

This is a vivid often hilarious account of when people took to the road during the Russian Civil War. The author’s experience can hardly be considered universal as she was a celebrity, connected and well-known in theatrical and literary circles—that said she spent days in a steamship bathroom during a turbulent passage.
The account is rife with citations and allusion. I appreciated that. Her observations appear rather honest and stripped of stereotype or ideological preconceptions. Hunger and hygiene don’t appear as prevalent as one might imagine, but I suspect this is due to the author remaining itinerant, just ahead of those grim realities.

Interesting happenings on a journey well told

Teffi’s ‘Memories’ captures the universal experiences of refugees: the uncertainty, the rumors, the panic, but also resilience, as people flee to safety while holding on to hope that they will return to the lives they have always known. In 1917 poet and playwright Teffi fled the political chaos after the Russian Revolution political chaos; she enjoyed some renown in Moscow, which helped her as she “slid down the map” from Moscow to the Crimean port city of Novorossisk, and finally on to Constantinople (and, ultimately, Paris). Along the way she shares the stories of other refugees—humorous and sad—none of whom knew where to settle and when. “My memories…are still being whirled about by a stifling whirlwind—just as scraps of this and splinters of that…just as people themselves were whirled this way and that way, left and right, over the mountains or into the sea,” she writes. “Soulless and mindless, with the cruelty of an elemental force, this whirlwind determined our fate” (204). Beautifully written and sometimes surreal.

Teffi was an extremely popular writer in early twentieth-century Russia, producing plays, journalism, short stories, and little satirical sketches called feuilletons. In 1918, as the Russian Civil War was in full swing, she embarked on what was meant to be a short reading tour in the southern provinces, but never came home: the political situation deteriorated fast and she ended up bouncing between cities for over a year before finally taking ship for Constantinople. Memories is about that long flight. Bits of it are very funny, like the women who take advantage of emigration panic to get cut-price fabric and a decent haircut (no one else is out and about!) Much of it is chilling: one of Teffi’s early events in a theatre ends with the women of the town calling to her from the audience, “God bless you, sweetheart… we hope you get out.” She usually doesn’t portray graphic violence, but there’s a terrible two days in a town run by a sadistic female commissar: on a walk to the river, Teffi and her fixer see dogs gnawing on body parts. Memories gives the impression of someone walking a mental tightrope. It’s not that Teffi doesn’t know or care what’s going on; it’s that the only way to keep sane is to brush lightly over the horrors. Before leaving Russia for good, she climbs a hill in Novorossiysk that holds a gallows and thinks about the last hours of a female anarchist named Ksenya G who was murdered there, a brilliant and moving parallel to her own symbolic impending “death” in exile. Memories reads fast and easy yet sticks in the mind. Very worthwhile.

An almost casual account of her flight through Russia to eventual safe exile in France. This breezy, cocktail-story tone conceals the deadly seriousness of her plight and all its terror and uncertainty. It illustrates the randomness, the chaos and the fear of the refugee.

"A joke is not so funny when you're living inside it. It begins to seem more like a tragedy"

Quietly devastating is one of my favourite ways to describe something, but nothing's deserved it as aptly as Teffi's memoir of fleeing the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. Her breezy descriptions of the mundane and ridiculous aspects of refugee life are humorous in their honesty and make the ultimate acceptance that she and her fellow travelers will never be able to return home hit all the harder.