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Writing a New Self and Creating a Sense for Emotional Belonging: the Case of Nadezhda Teffi, a Russian Writer in Interwar Paris

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Writing a New Self and Creating a Sense for Emotional Belonging: the Case of Nadezhda Teffi, a Russian Writer in Interwar Paris Writing A New Self and Creating a Sense for Emotional Belonging: The Case of Nadezhda Teffi, a Russian Writer in Interwar Paris Natalia Starostina, Young Harris College When considering the great upheavals of twentieth-century European history, the experience of Russian émigrés in interwar France may strike the historian as a dramatic, sudden, and deep change in luck.1 Many Russian émigrés who ended up on the shores of the Seine after 1917 were the members of the Russian intellectual and political elites who had enjoyed the life of prestige, wealth, refined social and cultural opportunities in tsarist Russia. For many Russian émigrés, life as they knew it was turned upside down when they left Russia. They had to begin their life anew, to rebuild their identities, and to reinvent the self. The experience of women émigrés was especially difficult. Many women had lost their relatives and husbands during the First World War and the Russian Civil War, and many needed to 1 Héléne Menegaldo, Les Russes à Paris: 1919-1939 (Paris: Autrement, 1998) and “L’émigré russe en ses divers avatars,” in Figures de l’émigré russe en France au XIXe et XXe siècle. Fiction et réalité, eds. Charlotte Krauss and Tatiana Victoroff (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), 55-84; Nikita Struve, Soixante-dix ans d'émigration russe: 1919-1989 (Paris: Fayard, 1996) and “Les trois vagues de l’émigration russe” in Figures de l’émigré russe en France au XIXe et XXe siècle, op. cit., 23-7; Catherine Klein-Gousseff, L'exil russe: la fabrique du refugié ́ apatride, 1920-1939 (Paris: CNRS, 2008); Robert Harold Johnston, New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris and the Russian Exiles, 1920-1945 (Kingston: McGill Queen's University Press, 1988); Katherine Foshko, “France's Russian Moment: Russian emigré ́s in interwar Paris and French society,” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2008); Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and John Glad, Russia Abroad: Writers, History, Politics (Tenafly, NJ: Hermitage & Birchbark Press, 1999). Writing a New Self 63 become primary caregivers for their children. At the same time, despite the trials and challenges of their émigré existence, the Russian émigrés sought to revive the traditions of literary salons. In addition, the Russian community had made efforts to become better integrated in the artistic and cultural life of Paris. This paper addresses the efforts of Nadezhda Teffi and other Russian émigrés to revive the atmosphere of intense cultural dialogue and to re- establish the pre-1914 tradition of Saint-Petersburg literary salons in France. The creation of a literary salon was considered by these Russian émigrés as a way to become a part of the French literary milieu. As this paper shows, such efforts resulted in a partial success. Many émigrés needed to negotiate between their loyalty to their natal culture and their cultural adjustment, if not assimilation, to French culture. For many Russian literary émigrés, successful assimilation into French culture seemed to symbolize disloyalty to the Russian culture. Consequently, many cultural discourses and practices which Russian émigrés brought with them were met with a limited interest by the Parisian literary establishment. By portraying certain limits of a Russian literary salon to ensure the integration of Russian intelligentsia into the realm of French contemporary life, Teffi suggested the importance of writing as a means of negotiating this cultural terrain: a sheet of paper became a metaphorical realm where Russian and French cultural traditions, the “old” Russian self and the “foreign” French one, could merge to fashion a “new émigré” self. Through writing, the new self could whimsically combine sophisticated and refined aspects of Russian culture, nostalgia about the lost motherland, and grapple with the realities of making difficult and painful choices, in ways that might assist successful assimilation into French culture. In order to analyze the writings of Teffi, this article theoretically engages with the works of Maurice Halbwachs, Roland Barthes, Jurgen̈ Habermas, Jochen Hellbeck, and Dena Goodman. In his works on memory, Halbwachs showed the significance of memory for creating a group identity. For Halwbachs, an individual becomes engaged in the constant process of re-editing and redefining one’s memory narratives in order to edit such memory narratives in correspondence with dominant discourses.2 Roland Barthes reflected on the significance of myths and mythologies in creating modern identities and in 2 Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997). English translation: On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Journal of the Western Society for French History 64 Starostina bringing a sense of justice to everyday life.3 In addition, the work of a historian Jochen Hellbeck analyzes the complex process of identity construction by taking a close look at the diaries of Soviet citizens under Stalin’s rule: Hellbeck shows how the ideas in the public sphere enter a complex dialogue with one’s realm of private ideas and emotions. Hellbeck shows that the identities of Soviet citizens were shaped by dominant discourses existing in a society even when experience of such individuals contradicted such discourses.4 Writing played an essential role in the transformation of Hellbeck’s subject of the study, a peasant Stepan Podlubny: by writing his diary Podlubny sought to become a “new man,” and thus, writing and language became the realm where identity transformation had taken place. By emphasizing the importance of language, Hellbeck highlights the essential relationship between writing, the construction of the self, and the public sphere. In addition, recent works by historians of France on salon culture likewise emphasize their significance in the public sphere. As Dena Goodman and other scholars demonstrate, literary salons, an important invention in early modern France, played a vital role in disseminating new ideas, created new patterns of sociability, and allowed wealthy educated women to shape the public opinion and to establish powerfully their presence in the French public sphere.5 Through the lenses of these diverse texts, the efforts of Teffi and other Russian émigrés to revive the tradition of the Russian literary salon on the shore of the Seine highlight the importance of such activities in rebuilding their identity. The article uses many short stories and feuilletons written by Teffi. Many of such stories are a first-person narrative; they represent the chronicle of not just the Russian émigré community in Paris, but show the process of forging the new “self” by Teffi. The writer recorded how conversations with her Russian compatriots would inspire her subject matters and specific expressions in her stories. For instance, in her story “Ke fer?” (a 3 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957). English translation: Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013). 4 Johen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Inspired by the “linguistic turn” and works by Jurgen̈ Habermas, Hellbeck examines complex interactions between the public and private spheres. 5 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press; 2009). 2013 Writing a New Self 65 French question “Que Faire?” or “What to do?”), published in the Russian émigré newspaper Poslednie Novosti (Latest News) on April 1927, Teffi described the situation of a newly arrived Russian émigré. The story portrays certain emotional paralysis of a former Russian general who is standing at the Place de la Concorde in Paris. In the aftermath of his tour of Paris, the general asks a question which deeply troubles him: “It is, of course, all well, gentlemen. It is all very well. But... ke faire? Faire … ke?” In his memoir, a Russian émigré-writer Don Aminado recorded that Teffi heard about the general and his rhetorical questions “ke faire” from her émigrés-friends, and immediately asked a permission to use this expression in her short story.6 “What to do?” became the central question in negotiating a Russian émigré identity in this reconstituted French public sphere. Nadezhda Teffi remains one of the most popular Russian writers in contemporary Russia today, although few of her works have been translated to English and French.7 Teffi enjoyed a great 6 See annotations to the story “Ke Faire?” by D. D. Nikolaev in N. A. Teffi, Sobranie sochineniĭ, vol. 3, “Gorodok” (“A Town”), ed. D. D. Nikolaev and E. M. Trubilova (Moscow: Lakom, 1998), 366-7. According to another version, Teffi had heard this question from her brother, Nikolaĭ Alexandrovich Lokhvitsky. 7 Recently, the life and works of Nadezhda Teffi have become the subject of increasing scholarly attention even though in postwar decades Teffi’s literary legacy attracted less attention than that of Ivan Bunin or Aleksandr Kuprin, famous Russian writers-émigrés. This is a paradox because her short stories, plays and a novel which appeared in Parisian newspapers in interwar decades were immensely popular among the Russian diaspora: her works have helped Russian emigres to see the commonality of their experience and suggested ways to cope with the challenges of their exile.
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