Stories about the occult, folk religions, superstition and spiritual customs in pre-Revolutionary Russia by one of the nation's most beloved 20th century authors, best known for her comic and satirical sketches.
The translucent surface of her writing gives sight of the depths of the human spirit: its raging and yearning, its dark nights and joyous awakenings, its wild cries, its anarchic craziness ... Questions ripple...concerning what we can understand about the nature of events, and about the transformative moments that thread events together into stories. Are these tales of witches, werewolves, demons, spirits, shape-shifters, and saving miracles really stories of the supernatural and the sacred? The short story, a genre Teffi mastered to perfection, is the ideal form for preserving enigmas in all their strangeness ... Teffi’s stories recreate this world of games, dreams, and madness, with its cast of nannies, servants, local peasants, house spirits, bathhouse devils, shape-shifters, and vampires ... Teffi’s stories often turn on juxtapositions of illusion and reality, moments when the intensity of the inner life bursts out.
Teffi tells many of her tales in the first person...and her prose creates the illusion both of spontaneity and confidentiality ... The narrator has no authorial omnipotence...thus inviting the complicit reader into a private world ... Descriptive passages are quietly lyrical ... though there is often an elegiac tone, the nostalgia of exile ... But the tales here are not rooted in a geographical place. They are rooted in the spiritual world—a realm that feels lost amid our own tumult of materialism ... The wit that earned Teffi eponymous sweets is visible here in a lightness of touch ... Mr. Chandler and his co-translators are everywhere sensitive to the literal meaning and also, crucially, to context, rhythm and idiom. Teffi often writes in a highly accented vernacular that presents a challenge, one that’s handled with skill here ... Teffi bids us to accept the mystery of this strange business of life in all its delightful quiddity.
Questions ripple through...all concerning what we can understand about the nature of events, and about the transformative moments that thread events together into stories. Are these tales of witches, werewolves, demons, spirits, shape-shifters, and saving miracles really stories of the supernatural and the sacred? The short story, a genre Teffi mastered to perfection, is the ideal form for preserving enigmas in all their strangeness.
