Teffi

Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was born in St. Petersburg in 1872 into a family so literary it was almost funny — her sister became a famous poet, her father loved the law, and little Nadya, who would one day make all of Russia laugh under the pen name Teffi, spent her childhood reading books and noticing that people were ridiculous. Not cruel-ridiculous. Just wonderfully, helplessly ridiculous, the way a woman puts on her best hat to visit a dentist, or a man tells a lie so small and so unnecessary that you can only feel sorry for him.

She began writing poems, then discovered that what she really wanted to write were short stories and feuilletons — those light, sharp little newspaper pieces that Russians loved with their morning tea. And she was so good at this, so terribly good, that both the Tsar and Lenin were said to read her, which tells you something about her talent, because those two men agreed on almost nothing. Her stories in collections like Humorous Stories and The Lifeless Beast found the comedy hiding inside ordinary sadness — a woman who cannot stop buying things she does not need, a man who ruins his own happiness through sheer nervousness. She made people laugh, yes, but the laughter always had a little ache inside it, like a sweet with a bitter centre.

Then came the Revolution, and Teffi, who had only ever wanted to observe life from a comfortable chair, found herself swept out of Russia in 1919 — first to Constantinople, then to Paris, where she lived for the rest of her long life among other Russian exiles. She kept writing, because what else could she do? In her memoir Memories she described the chaos of escape with the same wry, gentle eye she had always turned on human foolishness. She died in Paris in 1952, far from home, still noticing everything, still forgiving almost all of it.