Nadezdha Teffi

Nadezhda Teffi (1872-1952) is regarded today as the foremost chronicler of Russian emigre life in Paris in the years following the 1917 Revolution, the most valuable creation of Russian émigré literature, a major writer in the Gogolian tradition. She was born Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya in St. Petersburg, into a distinguished gentry family. By the start of World War I Teffi was Russia's most famous female author. Liberal in her political beliefs, she drew the line at communism and settled in Paris in 1919, where she focused her acute powers of observation on her fellow emigres. Almost all of her hundreds of sharply comic stories have been published in the last decade after a long neglect in her homeland. Three books of her prose came out in English translation recently.
Her stories 'Solovki' and 'Kishmish' are featured in Slav Sisters: The Dedalus Book of Women's Literature.

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