And Time Was No More, page 17
The post-war years were a bleak time for Teffi and her fellow writers. The Red Army’s victory and the left-wing sympathies of the French intelligentsia made the dwindling émigré community seem more of an anomaly than ever. Even Teffi herself and her close friend Ivan Bunin appear to have at least toyed with the possibility of returning to Russia. One of Teffi’s reasons for staying in France was a fear that, if she left, she might never be able to see Valeria again. Another was her awareness that, after a brief lull during the four years of the war, the Soviet authorities were once again intensifying their persecution of writers. During an interview in November 1946, she recalled entering the spa town of Piatigorsk during her last days in Russia:
I saw an enormous placard across the road: “Welcome to the first Soviet Health Resort.” The sign was held up by two posts, from which two hanged men were swinging. Now I’m afraid that when I enter the USSR I’ll see a placard with the inscription: “Welcome, Comrade Teffi,” and Zoshchenko and Akhmatova will be hanging from the supporting poles.3
A heart attack in November 1947 led to a long, nearly fatal illness and Teffi’s already desperate financial situation was aggravated by her inability—even as she began to recover—to work at her more routine journalism. Her physical weakness, however, did not prevent her from writing some of her most ambitious stories. “And Time Was No More”—a stream-of-consciousness evocation of her thoughts and dreams during her recent illness—is one of several late works in which she addresses such unanswerable questions as the nature of the divine and the origins of evil and of human suffering. In a letter to Bunin, she explained that she couldn’t help but write this story—“it sat inside me and gnawed at me”.4
The story’s narrator talks eloquently about a world soul. Her words recall a passage from “On the Unity of Love”, a lecture Teffi gave in 1929 to a literary-philosophical discussion group called The Green Lamp. In it she summarized the understandings of one of the sixth-century desert fathers, Abba Dorotheos:
The universe is a circle. The centre of the circle is God. The radii from this centre to the circumference are the paths of the soul. The closer souls are to one another, the closer to God.
And on that penultimate ascent along the radii of love, along which the souls of the righteous soar in blissful ecstasy—on this ascent, every love is close to every other love. And so the righteous see the soul of a wolf, of a bear, of a flower, and of a grasshopper. They see every soul where there is love. And they are in touch with that soul. There, in that sphere, all dividing walls collapse. All beings reach out along the radii of love. An ecstatic nun with stigmata on her hands, a sinful Sodomite who has washed his clothes clean with his own tears of anguish, an old woman with a wretched geranium, Saint Francis’s little brother the hare, God’s servants the dandelion and the violet—beings of every kind ascend along the radii of love. There are many ways to the One, to the centre, to God.
In 1951 Teffi sent the manuscript of My Chronicle, her collection of memoirs of writers and other public figures, to a Russian-language publishing house in New York. My Chronicle was not published as a whole, but the individual memoirs had either already been published or were published separately after Teffi’s death. “Ilya Repin” was probably meant to be the book’s last chapter; Teffi’s words about the sadness of wandering about “the graveyard of my tired memory” would have made a fitting conclusion.
The relationship between comedy and tragedy is a subject Teffi returned to many times. In response to a request from a well-meaning editor for “a few funny little stories” to tell at a benefit he was arranging for her in New York, she wrote in October 1951, “You want a few jolly stories from the life of someone now worn out and mindless. But I’m sure you know that an anecdote is amusing when recounted—but not when it is lived through. A joke you live through is a tragedy. My life has been a joke through and through—i.e., a tragedy through and through.”5
The letters Teffi wrote during her last years to Bunin and a few other close friends include frequent witticisms about her poverty and ill health. On 19 May 1952, she wrote, “All my contemporaries are dying, but I somehow carry on living. It’s as if I’m sitting in the waiting room at the dentist’s while he summons his patients in what is obviously the wrong order. It feels awkward to say anything and I just keep sitting there, tired and bad-tempered.”6
Shortly before Teffi’s death, her friend Tamara Panteleimonova brought her some morphine, which allowed her a brief period of freedom from pain. By then, Teffi was finding it difficult to speak. She thanked Tamara in writing, and with her still unfailing wit. On a page of paper torn from a notebook, she wrote, “There is no higher love than that of someone who gives to his brother his own morphine.”7
Teffi died of heart failure on 6 October 1952.
Notes
1 Haber’s translation (Teffi, p. 179).
2 See Haber, Teffi, p. 190.
3 See Haber, Teffi, p. 198. After a relatively liberal period during the war, the year 1946 saw a renewed clampdown on the arts. The poet Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko were vilified in the press and expelled from the Writers’ Union.
4 Haber, Teffi, p. 201.
5 For a slightly reworded variant of this quote, see “Tri iumorista”, in Andrey Sedykh, Dalekie, blizkie, 2nd edn (New York: Izd. “Novogo russkogo slova”, 1962), p. 87.
6 See Haber, Teffi, p. 223. (translation slightly revised).
7 S. Nikonenko, “Nesravnennaya Teffi”, in N. A. Teffi, Moia letopis’ (Moscow: Vagrius, 2004) p. 14.
The Other World
In the summer of 1945, it was rumoured that Teffi had died; one New York journal even published her obituary. Teffi responded with her characteristic wit, publishing the following in the Paris daily newspaper Russian News.
Perhaps one should begin with something like this:
“Dear Sir, Esteemed Editor,
Allow me, by means of your respected newspaper, to thank all who have had prayers sung for my departed soul, and to offer to all my relatives my condolences with regard to my untimely end. I also thank the authors of my obituaries.”
No—too dry. It needs, somehow, to sound more heartfelt. People have, after all, expressed feelings and not begrudged candles. Moreover, I am truly moved. But I’m out of my depth. There is no accepted etiquette in relation to such an unprecedented event—no guidance as to how the genteel deceased should behave.
An appropriate etiquette is sure to evolve soon, since nowadays we all too often meet people whose obituaries we have read and for whose departed souls we have wept and prayed. It’s not simply a matter of idle gossip, of someone making up stories for the fun of it. What lies behind this phenomenon is an entirely correct understanding: that for many of us today dying is more natural than living. Can someone weak, elderly and in poor health really be expected to live happily through the winter in an unheated building, on an empty stomach, to the wail of air-raid sirens and the roar of bombs, and in a state of grief and despair for those close to them, for those far away, for humanity and for the world as a whole?
A great poet once wrote:
Whatever threatens us with doom
Brings to a mortal heart
A thrill of ineffable delight.1
I do believe the great poet. But then the impending winter without heating is certain to be the death of me—and this brings me no thrill of ineffable delight. Absolutely not—not the least hint of ineffable delight.
What brings ineffable delight, I suppose, is a historical death, a beautiful, inspired death in the name of some ideal, with words on one’s lips that will go down in history. But such a death, a death consciously chosen by someone strong in spirit, is a far cry from our own aimless, spineless, abject and impotent whining. And how and why, anyway, are we still alive at all—in this pre-Promethean world, with neither light nor warmth?2
“Apparently, so and so has died.”
“Yes, we’ve heard words to that effect. We must offer our condolences. And have prayers sung for his soul.”
“Where has this news come from?”
“From London.”
“From America.”
“From Paris. But is it true?”
“Of course. There have been obituaries. Prayers for the repose of his soul. It must be true.”
And then the deceased reads his own obituary. He shakes his head and doesn’t know how he’s supposed to feel. Should he be grateful—or take offence? After all, being struck off the list of the living is generally seen as offensive and is certainly inconvenient. If the deceased is a person of means, this obituary may give rise to unpleasant family squabbles. His heirs may make awkward demands:
“My dearest uncle, we gave up our apartment, expecting—in view of your death—to move into yours. How can we recover the expenses we have incurred? Might you be able to take it upon yourself…”
It is being rumoured in Russia—and these rumours have been reliably confirmed—that Ivan Bunin has died. Bunin is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a Nobel laureate—our preeminent man of letters. A state publishing house has decided to bring out a posthumous edition of his collected works. Posthumous—yet Bunin is alive.3 A living writer prepares his works for publication himself, perhaps omitting some adolescent verses he now considers rather weak. The position of an author of a posthumous edition is exceedingly awkward. It doesn’t matter to a dead author, but a living author—especially one so celebrated, one who will take his place among the classics—finds it most vexing to see his works presented in what to him seems the wrong way. And the publisher, for his part, might well value the author’s opinion. How this matter will be resolved, there’s no knowing.
Our life today is very strange. Everything about it is strange. People, events, politics, phenomena of every kind. People suddenly go missing; the deceased visit one another. Maybe some of these deceased believe that they really have died and that everything they now see before them, everything they find so astonishing, is indeed the other world, a life beyond the grave, a non-human, everyday life outside the bounds of human logic. And maybe, they really have died. After all, according to the testimony of such experts in mortal matters as Maurice Maeterlinck,4 people lose consciousness at the moment of death and do not sense the transition to another life. So how can we know that we have not already made that transition?
In some respects, this new other-worldly life is reminiscent of our old life. Yet, when you look more closely, it appears to have lost its axis, lost its logic. But then logic is entirely a matter of human reason—and what does human reason count for in the other world? Everything here is inexplicable. It would, of course, be easier if this new life had no similarities at all to our old life. But we have no say in the matter.
Everyday life in the other world has little to recommend it. In our earthly lives we knew that we all have bodies and—in spite of many attempts of all kinds to prove that animal life, i.e. the life of our bodies, does not deserve our respect—we all understood that we need to show some concern for this animal life. Even the church said, “For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it.”5 And so we nourished and cherished it. We recognized the human body’s right to existence. We thought up special institutions to improve food distribution. States entered into trade agreements. Ministers flew in planes to foreign countries; menus of their breakfasts and dinners were printed in newspapers; and, to a musical accompaniment, their concerned, slightly smiling faces were shown on cinema screens. All this was done in order to support the animal life of the nations to which the breakfasting ministers belonged. Flesh had the right to exist and it demanded our respect and concern.
But here, in this other world, there is no concern for the flesh.
“Coal? You want coal? What eccentrics you are! How can you expect coal when nothing has been resolved yet and we may require coal for a future war?”
“Ah, now we understand. It’s needed to finish us off—and we idiots were simply hoping to warm ourselves. Thank God, there are clever people to explain things!”
And we must, finally, understand, that if we are in the other world, then our bodies are not our former bodies but astral bodies. All right, let’s make that assumption. But in that case, the authorities should be offering us astral coal and astral sugar. An astral body evidently has its own requirements, and these merit consideration. But they are being given no consideration at all, and inhabitants of the other world are having to look after themselves. But how can they? Money doesn’t enable one to obtain anything at all, since our money is now worthless. Astral money. Money of no use to anyone but a medieval devil bargaining for the soul of some profligate who has squandered his father’s inheritance.
Here in the other world there are attempts to organize entertainment. Even here, people can’t do without it. And we do indeed have the cinema. Posters urge us to see newsreels about the former concentration camps. Images, apparently, that will stay with us throughout the whole of our life hereafter.
And so we go to the cinema.
There we are shown corpses. Corpses that have kept their human shape, with bared teeth, with eyes that have rolled back into the skull, with arms and legs twisted in death agony. Corpses of the drowned and corpses of those who have been burned; corpses of those who have been hanged, of those who have been shot, of those buried alive. We are shown skulls, bones, entire skeletons, and fragments and slivers. Then we are shown Majdanek.6
An aerial view. A flat plateau. Small rectangular buildings evenly spaced. All correct and orderly. Only in the middle, protruding from a somewhat larger building—a tall factory chimney.
“What is this place? A factory settlement? God, how bleak and dismal it looks. How could anyone live here?”
“They didn’t. That’s a crematorium chimney. People died here.”
This clear, orderly little picture embodies such despair, such infinite anguish that the heaps of bones we have just seen begin to seem straightforward and unremarkable. A man dies, and his skeleton remains. Earth to earth, dust to dust. But what we have here—this crystallized despair, invented by man, created by human will—is ghastlier than any heap of skeletons. Heaped-up skeletons, a chaos of human bones—that is something we can imagine. On battlefields, in countries passed over by the whirlwind of revolution, we could have seen such pictures. But we could never have imagined this neat, well-ordered settlement of despair, its streets laid out in a grid and with a chimney of death standing over it.
Murders and vicious cruelty are inconceivable to us in the absence of chaos. Chaos tells us, loud and clear, that we have transgressed all boundaries, that we have passed beyond the limit of order, of all that is normal and human. And so even here, in the other world, these clean, orderly little buildings are impossible for us to comprehend.
By way of conclusion we are shown a dead city, the skeleton of a murdered Hamburg. We have seen many ruins, but never have we seen such a white, transparent skeleton—as if fashioned from fragile bisque porcelain. The city has not fallen to the ground, but it is wholly transparent, door-less, roof-less and window-less. On the water are skeleton ships, as if frozen. They too are white and transparent. And there are no sounds. No human beings and no animals. No birds flying over this spectre.
Did we ever, in our earthly life, see anything of the kind—the Book of Ecclesiastes, stiff and frozen, as if engraved with the finest of needles?
Über alles?
Satan was the best of God’s angels, but he grew proud and fell lower than all.
paris, 3 august 1945
translated by robert and elizabeth chandler
Notes
1 From Alexander Pushkin’s verse play A Feast in Time of Plague (1830). For the relevant stanzas, see Chandler, Dralyuk and Mashinski, eds, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, p. 79.
2 In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the Olympian gods and gave it to mankind.
3 Teffi’s version is not entirely accurate. A Soviet publishing house did indeed intend to publish Bunin, but only a one-volume selection, and Bunin was not thought to have died. Nevertheless, the publishing house had begun planning this volume without asking permission. After furious protests from Bunin, they backed down. (Tvorchestvo N. A. Teffi, ed. O.N. Mikhailov, D.D. Nikolaev and E.M.Trubilova (Moscow: IMLI, 1999), p. 215).
4 Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), a Belgian Symbolist playwright, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911. Death was one of his central themes.
5 Ephesians 5:29.
6 Located on the outskirts of Lublin, in eastern Poland, Majdanek was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp. Due to the rapid advance of the Red Army in July 1944, it was captured nearly intact. It was the first major concentration camp to be liberated, and the atrocities committed there were widely publicized.
Volya
O to live free, freer than free;
O to live free as the wind.
novgorod folk song
“See, summer’s here!”
“Spring’s come. It’s May. Spring.”
How can you tell? Spring? Summer? A few days of stifling heat—and then: rain, a little May snow, and it’s back to lighting the stove. And then—it’s stifling hot again.
It wasn’t like that for us. Our northern spring was a real event.
The sky changed—and so did the air, the earth, the trees.
Secret powers—all the secret saps and juices accumulated during the winter—would suddenly burst free.
Animals roar; wild beasts snarl. The air fills with the sound of wings. High up, just beneath the clouds, like a heart soaring over the Earth—a triangle of cranes. The river—all crashing ice floes. Streams babble and gurgle along ravines. The whole earth trembles with light, with ringing, with rustles, whispers and loud cries.
