New Book
Stories about the occult, folk religions, superstition, and spiritual customs in Russia by one of the most essential 20th-century writers of short fiction and essays. Though best known for her comic and satirical sketches of pre-Revolutionary Russia, Teffi was a writer of great range and human sympathy. The stories on other-worldly themes in this collection are some of Teffi’s finest and most profound, displaying her acute psychological sensitivity beneath her characteristic wit and surface brilliance. Other Worlds gathers together stories, written over a span of forty years, about the deep connection of the supernatural to everyday life in the Russian provinces and the persistent influence of the ancient Slavic gods in legends, superstitions, and customs, simultaneously coexisting with Russian Orthodox Christianity. In an early story, “A Quiet Backwater,” a laundress gives a long disquisition on the name days of the different birds, insects, and animals, as well as the Feast of the Holy Spirit, a day on which “no one dares to trouble the earth.” The story “Wild Evening” is about the fear of the unknown; “The Kind that Walk,” a penetrating study of anti-semitism, and of xenophobia more generally; and “Baba-Yaga,” about the archetypal Russian witch and her longing for wildness and freedom. In “Volya,” the final autobiographical story, the power and pain of Baba Yaga is Teffi’s own.
About the Author: Teffi (1872–1952) was the pen name of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, born in St. Petersburg into a distinguished family that treasured literature. She and her three sisters all became writers. Teffi wrote in a variety of styles and genres: political feuilletons published in a Bolshevik newspaper during her brief period of radical fervor after the 1905 Revolution; Symbolist poems that she declaimed or sang in Petersburg literary salons; popular one-act plays, mostly humorous or satirical (one was entitled The Woman Question); and a novel titled simply Adventure Novel. Her finest works are her short stories—collected in Other Worlds and Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me—and Memories, a witty, tragic, and deeply perceptive account of her last journey across Russia and what is now Ukraine, before going by boat to Istanbul in the summer of 1919. Teffi was widely read; her admirers included not only such writers as Bunin, Bulgakov, and Zoshchenko but also both Lenin and the last tsar. In pre-Revolutionary Russia, candies and perfumes were named after her; after the Revolution, her stories were published and her plays performed throughout the Russian diaspora. She died in Paris.
