Teffi. Nevyplakannye zlëzy

Teffi. Unshed Tears The essay explores Teffi’s (Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, 1872-1952), intense literary activity during the emigration period in Paris after 1918, focusing on the issue of exile, with particular attention to her most famous work, Gorodok (1927), its uprooted characters, and their quest for a ‘home’. This study analyses the theme of memory and nostalgia in Teffi's tales, following the two metaphorical directions of memory mentioned by Harald Weinrich. Both concepts are of Greek origins: the first concerns the image of the wax tablet on which the data of memory are imprinted when ‘we wish to remember anything we see or hear or think of in our own minds’ (Plato, Theaetetus, 191d); the second is linked to the idea of memory as functional to recollection, ‘when the soul alone by itself, apart from the body, recalls any experience it has had in company with the body’ (Plato, Philebus, 34). Teffi’s emigration tales show how memory does not merely duplicate facts, but reconstruct them with hindsight, on the basis of new experiences coming from outside. Thence, for the writer, the process of remembrance implies a reinterpretation of the events. The memories of Teffi’s heroes about their previous life in Russia are not triggered by important information, but by small details that they associate with earlier experiences. Exile strengthens their sensitivity to the theme of Russia and enlarges the role of memory. The characters never experience a rupture with Russia: their homeland is constantly in their thoughts. In her tales, Teffi feels the necessity of both vspominat’ (remembering) and napominat’ (reminding) the past, fearing that it could be forgotten. The result is a worldview similar to the one that had prevailed during her formation in Russia, at the time of Symbolism: it is a vision of a dualistic world in which earthly existence appears empty and meaningless, while the ‘true reality’ is elsewhere. It is from this feeling that the ‘Big sadness’ and the inability to live in harmony with the surrounding environment originate. Both are typical features of Teffi and her characters.