Is there anything one can never laugh about? A question inevitably hanging over humour writing, it’s best answered by the masters of the genre who, rather than inventing jokes (a skill many possess), notice life’s winks and chuckles and tease them out of their surrounding matter, even if the latter happens to be of grave concern. Teffi was one of those writers.
Born in 1872 in St Petersburg, by her early twenties Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya was a housewife with three children stranded in a provincial town; by her early thirties she was back in the capital, a literary celebrity writing for various publications under a snappy pseudonym, her witticisms quoted ‘in the streets, in trams, in clubs, in living rooms, at student gatherings’. To get there she had abandoned her family, a step she never publicly discussed, telling her eldest daughter years later: ‘Had I remained, I would have perished.’
Teffi was generally reserved about her private life, and Edythe Haber, her first ever biographer, often admits that ‘little concrete is known about’ a particular period or event.
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