Teffi
Teffi () (, Saint Petersburg – 6 October 1952, Paris) was a Russian humorist writer. Teffi was the pseudonym of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya (Наде́жда Алекса́ндровна Лoхви́цкая), known after her marriage as Nadezhda Alexandrovna Buchinskaya (Бучи́нская). Together with Arkady Averchenko she was one of the prominent authors of the magazine "Novyi Satirikon". Her year of birth is variously reported in the range 1871–1876, with the most recent findings suggesting May 1872. Teffi's sister Mirra Lokhvitskaya (1869–1905) was a notable Russian poet. Biography. Teffi was born into a family of gentry. Her father, a lawyer and scholar, was prominent in Saint Petersburg society . Her mother was of French descent, a lover of poetry, and familiar with Russian and European literature. Teffi was first introduced to literature when, as a young girl, she read "Childhood" and "Boyhood" by Leo Tolstoy, and the fiction of Alexander Pushkin. Her own first published poetry appeared in the journal "The North" in 1901 under her full name. In 1905 her first story, "The Day Has Passed", was published in the journal "The Fields", also under her full name. It had been written in 1904 and first submitted to the journal "God's World", which had turned it down . In the years surrounding the Russian Revolution of 1905 she published stories with political overtones against the Tsarist government. In an answer to a questionnaire given to writers in 1911, Teffi said the following about her early literary work: Teffi married Vladislav Buchinsky, a Polish lawyer and judge, but they separated in 1900. They had two daughters and a son together. She was a contributor to the first Bolshevik journal "The New Life", whose editorial board included writers like Maxim Gorky and Zinaida Gippius. Her best work appeared in "Satiricon" magazine and the popular journal "Russkoye Slovo" (Russian Word). In  Russia she published many collections of poetry and short stories, and a number of one-act plays. She first used the pseudonym "Teffi" with the publication in 1907 of her one-act play "The Woman Question". She provided two separate explanations of the name; that it was suggested to her in relation to a friend whose servant called him "Steffi", or that it came from the English rhyme "Taffy was a Welshman/Taffy was a thief." Initially a supporter of the October Revolution, she rapidly became disenchanted with the Bolsheviks and in 1919 left Saint Petersburg, and on the pretext  of a theatrical tour, travelled with a group of actors across Russia and Ukraine, eventually reaching Istanbul. In 1920, she settled in Paris and began publishing her works in the Russian newspapers there. In exile, she wrote a vivid account of her escape from the Soviet Union through the chaos of the Russia Civil War (Memories, 1928–1930) and published several collections of short stories and poems and her only novel "An Adventure Novel" (1932). The critic Anastasiya Chebotarevskaya compared Teffi's stories, which she said were "highly benevolent in their elegiac tone and profoundly humanitarian in their attitudes", to the  best stories by Anton Chekhov. Teffi is buried at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery in France. In 2018, Edythe Haber's biography of Teffi was published, the first such work in any language.